New York, USA, has returned 657 cultural relics worth nearly US$14 million to India and said “more work remains to be done” in returning stolen cultural relics to India.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced his return on Tuesday.
The works were recovered after multiple investigations into trafficking networks, including those linked to disgraced art dealer Subhash Kapoor and convicted trafficker Nancy Weiner.
The works were returned at an event attended by Consul General of India in New York, Rajlakshmi Kadam.
“The trafficking network targeting cultural heritage in India is vast, as evidenced by today’s return of more than 600 pieces of cultural heritage,” Bragg said in a statement. “Unfortunately, more work remains to be done to return stolen artifacts to India, and I thank our team for their tireless efforts.”
Binaya Pradhan, Consul General of India in New York, praised the continued cooperation of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and law enforcement agencies, saying “their continued vigilance” made the recovery and return of these culturally significant artifacts possible.
Returned items include a $2 million bronze statue of “Avalokitesvara,” seated on an inscribed double lotus pedestal above a lion-side throne.
The inscription identifies the craftsman as Dronaditya of Sipur, near Raipur in the modern state of Chhattisgarh.
Avalokiteshvara was one of a large number of bronze objects discovered near Lakshmana Temple in 1939 and was acquired by the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum in Raipur in 1952.
In 1982, the statue was stolen from the museum and smuggled to the United States, where it ended up in a private collection in New York in 2014. In 2025, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office located and seized the bronze artifact from the collection.
In 2000, one of Kapoor’s co-conspirators, Ranjeet Kanwar, snatched a sandstone statue of dancing “Ganesha” from a temple in Madhya Pradesh. The statue was later sold and shipped to New York gallery owner Doris Wiener by convicted trafficker Vaman Ghiya.
After the death of her mother Doris in 2012, Nancy Wiener (later convicted of antiquities trafficking) deliberately forged the provenance of the “Ganesha” statue, consigned it to Christie’s in New York and sold it.
“Ganesha” was purchased at auction in 2012 by a private collector who handed it over to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office earlier this year.
Another artifact is a red sandstone Buddha statue with his right hand raised in “Abaya Mudra”, a protective gesture. The statue’s legs were broken below the knees and only fragments of the halo behind the head are visible. The damage may have been caused when the statue was stolen from northern India.
The statue, worth $7.5 million, was smuggled to New York by Kapoor and seized from one of his New York storage units by the antiquities trafficking unit.
For more than a decade, the District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, along with law enforcement partners from Homeland Security Investigations, investigated Kapoor and his co-conspirators for their alleged illegal robbery, export and sale of antiquities from numerous countries in South and Southeast Asia.
The District Attorney’s Office obtained a warrant for Kapoor’s arrest in 2012. In November 2019, he and seven of his co-defendants were indicted for conspiring to traffic in stolen cultural artifacts.
Kapoor was convicted of human trafficking in India in 2022 and has not yet been extradited. Five of Kapoor’s co-defendants have been convicted by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
The Antiquities Trafficking Unit has now recovered more than 6,200 cultural treasures, including rare books, art and antiquities, worth more than $485 million, and has returned more than 5,900 of these items to 36 countries.
The ATU also convicted 18 cultural property-related criminals and seven suspected traffickers await extradition.
This article was generated from automated news agency feeds without modifications to the text.
