Egypt fights looters stealing its antiquities with spacecraft and statecraft
The closest comparison is Swiss cheese: holes in vast swaths of land where looters, armed with machine guns and bulldozers, take to ancient archaeological sites in search of international paydays. To the untrained eye, these holes, visible in satellite images, seem haphazard. But to experts, these deep pits, spanning acres of land, are the work of sophisticated traffickers.
It’s exactly the kind of looting that worries Mohamed Ibrahim Ali, Egypt’s minister of state for antiquities.“The objects that are stolen from museums are easier to track because they are registered,” Ibrahim said, referring to the archaeological artifacts taken from Egypt’sMalawi National Museum and Egyptian Museum in Cairo, many of which have been identified and returned. “The problem is the illicit digging everywhere. In Egypt, when you dig, you find something. So some gangs have started to become active very quickly because of the breakdown of the police force.”
