TEFAF Maastricht 2022 Image Credit: ARCA

On 15 April 2024 and 19 April 2024, ARCA published two articles building on an announcement made by Spain's Ministry of the Interior which involved the identification of a looted Egyptian object. That investigation involved the Policía Nacional's Historical Heritage Brigade in collaboration with the Dutch Politie, the expertise of an extremely knowledgeable forensic scholar, and the assistance of a cooperating art gallery. With their combined efforts, the Swiss dealer voluntarily relinquished the suspect antiquity to the Dutch police.

Yesterday, Caretaker Prime Minister Dick Schoof, in a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, announced that the Netherlands will hand over that same stolen sculpture by the end of the year.

Too frequently, antiquities restitution reporting becomes formulaic, providing only cursory information on an object's country of origin, value, age, and the agencies responsible for its seizure or restitution. This happened once again in this case, where one Dutch article reduced the historic object to its most basic description, “a 3,500-year-old stone head from the dynasty of Pharaoh Thutmose III,” followed by a brief paragraph speculating that the piece might be put on display at Egypt's the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which officially opened yesterday.

Basic shapes of block statues

ARCA, being a research-based organisation which specifically examines  crimes that impact art and artefacts, does its best to provide more details to problematic pieces and the problematic dealers that profit from them. Our reporting serves as a means of holding people accountable and reminding individuals of the need to collect responsibly. 

The artefact being returned is not just an Egyptian "head".  It is a decapitated head broken off of an 18th Dynasty Egyptian block statue that was likely intentionally hacked off its body, or deliberately broken at the shoulders for ease of smuggling. Had it been intact, this memorial statue would have shown a man crouched and wrapped in a cloak, inscribed, at the very least with the name of the owner, incised on the body, the base, or the back pillar if one existed. 

Our original reporting touched on what we were able to ascertain about this disembodied head of a squatting man. We knew he was documented on social media sites and came up for sale through a Swiss-based art dealer during the short-lived European Fine Art Fair in 2020 and again with this same dealer when the fair reopened post-Covid in 2022.  Having been the subject of a joint-European policing initiative we know that authorities were convinced he was illegally exported from Egypt in contravention of the country's cultural property laws, then transited through intermediaries in Thailand before being first put up for sale in Barcelona, where it was sold by controversial gallery owner, Jaume Bagot Peix, of J. Bagot Arqueología.

As early as 2015 Bagot's problematic purchasing had placed him on the radar of Policía Judicial y de la UCIE de la Comisaría General de Información.  In 2018, he and Oriol Carreras Palomar were formally charged for their alleged participation in a crime of financing terrorism, belonging to a criminal organisation, concealment of contraband, and use of forgery for their roles in facilitating the sale of illicit antiquities involving pieces trafficked from a second war torn country, Libya.  

Bagot also was charged, and subsequently convicted in Italy, related to a stolen Roman statue and has been linked to a stolen Egyptian ushabti from Sudan, which was again circulated on the art market with falsified provenance documentation. That artefact was sold to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in the Netherlands.  

But despite being suspected of trafficking material from at least three war-torn countries, and having one conviction in mainland Europe while other cases in other jurisdictions pile up, Bagot continues to receive favourable coverage in the press and has been described as operating "one of the most renowned ancient art galleries in Spain."  He also continues to be granted booths and promotion by Spain's Feriarte, an important annual art fair held at IFEMA Madrid, most recently from 18 to 26 October 2025, as well as at ANTIK Almoneda, another Madrid art sales event held from 22 to 30 March 2025.

All this demonstrates how long justice can take. In this Dutch restitution, it will have required five years from this objects initial sighting and identification at TEFAF in 2020 until its ultimate return to Egypt later this year and even longer for these problematic Spanish dealers to face the consequences of their actions. This case, like a second Bagot-related case in Belgium involving the the recent restitution of the Egyptian coffin of Pa-di-Hor-pa-khered, which was stolen from an archaeological site in Egypt in December 2015 and restituted in July 2025 both serve as reminders that restitution is not simply a bureaucratic exercise; it is a fight against a global market that too often rewards negligence and turns a blind eye to complicity. 

Until the art trade adopts a genuine commitment to better behaviour, transparency and due diligence, and holds its art market actors accountable, the cycle of loss, recovery, protracted restitution, and delayed accountability will continue, slowly, one object at a time.

French authorities have formally charged two more individuals in connection with the October 19, 2025 robbery of royal jewels from the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre Museum. Of the five people taken into custody on October 29, two face criminal charges; the other three have been released pending further investigation. 

The first of the newly charged suspects is a 38-year-old woman, indicted for “complicity in robbery committed by an organised gang” and “criminal association with a view to preparing the crime of robbery by an organised gang.” Presented to the court as "afraid" for her children and herself, through her attorney she has denied the charges. 

 The judge of freedoms and detention (JLD) ordered that she remain in custody for now, stating: 

“I do not rule out reassessing the situation, but I want the versions to be cross-checked. The ball is in the lady’s court. Her word will be decisive on the possibility of release under judicial supervision. If it does not lead to anything, we will draw conclusions.”

Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau revealed on November 2 that DNA recovered from the gondola lift used by the robbers matches the woman's genetic profile. 

The second suspect is a 37-year-old man, charged with “organised robbery and conspiracy to commit organised robbery.” He has requested a deferred hearing and remains in custody pending that session. Prosecutors say both of these suspects were previously known to law enforcement, as each had been tried together for a robbery in 2015, suggesting a prior relationship or at least collaboration in other criminal activity.

While still reeling from the Louvre jewel heist, a second high-profile daylight robbery occurred in the city of Lyon. 

Video footage published on the social media site X, taken by witnesses at around 2 p.m., from a neighbouring company shows multiple suspects, dressed in black coveralls with red arm bands, as the crime was getting underway.  Brandishing what appears to be military-grade weapons, the suspects can be seen calmly walking back and forth beside a white van equipped with a blue flashing light which they had parked outside the rear of the laboratory. 

One of the suspects can be seen calmly tossing a ladder over the fence while another detonates an explosive device, blowing out two security windows in the laboratory and injuring five employees. Witnesses reported hearing the explosions as well as possible shots fired from various locations in the district of Gerland, the 7th arrondissement along the River Rhône, where the business is located.

Once the thieves gained entry to the targeted building, the witness video shows one of the accomplices scaling the supplied ladder and throwing parcels back over the fence while another loaded a black case containing gold ingots into the vehicle before the thieves fled the scene. The delivery van was found burned less than two kilometres from the site of the robbery, where the perpetrators switched to a getaway car.

While the thieves may have thought they got away, driving back to a property in Vénissieux to divide the loot, officers of the Lyon (Rhône) Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) were actually already on their tail. The investigative team had them under surveillance in relation to an earlier robbery that also involved explosives. Hours of surveillance and stakeouts in connection with the first theft and preplanning of this second assault, culminated in a search and seizure team being formed to enter  the property.

The police subsequently entered the home via the garage and found the five perpetrators in an apartment on the upper floors, some of whom had tried to escape via the balconies but were apprehended without shots being fired. One accomplice, a young woman suspected of having dropped off a lookout before the robbery, was also taken into custody. 

At the scene, police recovered weapons, detonators, armed explosive devices, a large sum of cash and the €12 million in gold stolen from the Laboratoire Pourquery.  An additional search of a storage unit in Décines led to the recovery of additional weapons, ammunition, a bulletproof vest and a money counter, which tends to indicate the payout for thefts the team was involved with were high.  

Of the suspects described, four are said to be seasoned criminals in their thirties and forties, including one who was already sentenced to ten years in prison for armed robbery. One was wanted in connection with the double murder of the Abdelli brothers, who were gunned down by a burst of automatic gunfire in February 2016 in the Buers district of Villeurbanne, a city bordering Lyon. The murdered brothers, Omar, 34, and Lakdar, 37, were implicated in a murky drug case dating back to December 2012, which is still under investigation.

I mention this non art-related crime here to show the high steaks involved in gold and jewellery thefts.  The criminals involved in these types of activities, risking long  incarcerations if caught, are not always the gentile Thomas Crowne Affair types portrayed in films.  

It is vital to remember that while much of the focus on these thedts falls on the dazzling value of the stolen objects, the jewel-encrusted tiaras, historic necklaces of French royalty, and the multi-million-euro losses, the real stakes in violent robberies includes more than just gold and jewellery. For museum staff and first-responder security guards and room watchers at institutions like the Louvre, their foremost responsibility has to be protecting human life. 

When criminal operations escalate, using heavy equipment, angle grinders, or sledge hammers while masquerading as legitimate workers, the threat they pose is real. A museum guard’s role is not only to safeguard art when and how they can but to prevent lives being harmed. These heists are not glamorous set-pieces from a film; they can also carry the potential for deadly violence. As we follow the investigations, the message must be clear: in high-stakes robberies such as these, vigilance, strong protocol and awareness that human safety comes first are not optional, they are imperative.

By.  Lynda Albertson