The former director of the Louvre Museum in Paris and two French Egyptologists were taken into custody in France, accused of helping traffic millions of dollars worth of stolen art, some of which is alleged to have ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, reports Yahoo! News.
Jean-Luc Martinez was indicted late Wednesday for “complicity in fraud in an organized gang and laundering by false facilitation of the origin of property” after enduring a lengthy interrogation by art detectives in Paris.
The Egyptologists were briefly held and then released pending further investigation, which French media speculate could mean cooperating against Martinez.
The men have been under scrutiny over the provenance of hundreds of items of art that investigators say they “turned a blind eye” to when they bought it. Provenance is akin to a passport for ancient artifacts that prove where it is from and how it left the country of origin, either through sale or loan.
In the early 2000s, scores of American museums that had bought looted art through shady dealers in Italy and Greece were forced to return the treasures to the countries of origin.