Egypt has requested Interpol help track down a 3,000-year-old sculpture of pharaoh Tutankhamun sold last week by at Christie’s in the UK, escalating a bitter row between the two countries over the “stolen” relic.
Christie’s auction house in London sold the 11in brown quartz bust for £4.7 million to an anonymous buyer in early July at one of its most controversial auctions in years.
Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former Minister of Antiquities, said that the piece appeared to have been looted in the 1970s from the Karnak Temple complex just north of Luxor.
In an extremely rare intervention, Egypt’s National Committee for Antiquities Repatriation asked the UK Foreign Office and the UN cultural body Unesco to step in and halt the sale.
It suggested its failure to do so could have an impact on cultural relations between the allies and "the ongoing cooperation between both countries in the field of archaeology, especially that there are 18 British archaeological missions are working in Egypt."
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The committee released a statement late on Monday saying it had hired a British law firm to file a lawsuit against Christie’s, saying the auction house did not provide documents proving ownership.
Christie’s has denied any wrongdoing, saying it carried out "extensive due diligence" to verify the provenance of the statue and had "gone beyond what is required to assure legal title."
The auction house has published a chronology of how the relic changed hands between European art dealers over the past 50 years and told AFP that it would "not sell any work where there isn’t clear title of ownership."
Egypt’s campaign to recover lost art gained momentum after numerous works went missing during the looting that accompanied former president Hosni Mubarak’s fall from power in 2011.
Cairo has managed to regain hundreds of looted and stolen artefacts by working with both auction houses and international cultural groups.