IRAQ: US Attorney-General Mr John Ashcroft pledged yesterday to hunt down the organised gangs he said pillaged the museums and libraries during the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
"There is a strong case to be made that the looting and theft of the artefacts was perpetrated by organised criminal groups - criminals who knew precisely what they were looking for," Mr Ashcroft told a conference at the international police agency Interpol.
"Although the criminals who committed the theft may have transported the objects beyond Iraq's borders, they should know they have not escaped the reach of justice," he said.
Tens of thousands of artefacts were taken from the National Archaeological Museum in Baghdad during the anarchic spree that followed the US-led victory last month, and a major effort has been launched to prevent them reaching the international art market.
The two-day conference at Interpol's headquarters in the French city of Lyon brought together national police forces and experts from the International Council of Museums and the UN's cultural agency UNESCO to co-ordinate attempts to track the stolen items.
"Regardless of how sophisticated these criminals are or how hard they work to avoid detection, US law enforcement and our colleagues at Interpol will not rest till the stolen Iraqi artefacts are restored to their rightful place, the public museums and libraries of Iraq," Mr Ashcroft said.
US forces were widely blamed for failing to stop the looting after they captured the Iraqi capital.
"The looted treasures and artefacts are the touchstones of an artistic and intellectual tradition dating back to the earliest recorded years of history. Iraq is the cradle of civilisation," Mr Ashcroft said.
"In a land where a generation of Iraqis did not know truth or did not know beauty, their art and culture can return to them a sense of both truth and beauty."
However, Interpol officials said they had received no clear evidence that international gangs of traffickers had been behind the looting, and that most of the stolen items were presumed to be still in Iraq.
"In most cases the artefacts will be in the hands of ordinary people who have no network for selling them on. So we need to appeal to the population to make them understand they must return them," said Mr Jean-Pierre Jouanny, an Interpol agent specialising in cultural crime.
The gathering, attended by 70 delegates from around the world including 20 from the US, concluded with agreement to boost Interpol's existing database of stolen art so that the missing Iraqi objects can be posted on the Internet.
A task force will also be set up to co-ordinate actions by national police forces.
Interpol, which has 181 member states, has no authority to conduct its own investigations and acts primarily as a liaison.
Officials said there was still confusion over how much of the National Museum's treasure had disappeared and that many of the up to 200,000 objects reported to have been stolen might have been deposited elsewhere for safekeeping before the war or taken out for protection during the looting.
The museum's own inventory was believed to be intact and a photographic record of much of its contents, which was made last year by a French-based company, would also be valuable for establishing what was missing, they said.
The region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq was where the first writing, codified law and urban life were all developed some 10,000 years ago, and the Baghdad museum was recognised as the world's most important centre of Babylonian, Assyrian and other cultures.
Among the items known to have been lost are a collection of 80,000 cuneiform tablets that contain examples of some of the world's earliest writing and a 5,000 year-old alabaster vase known as the Warka Vase.
Mr Ashcroft, who on Monday took part in a G8 meeting in Paris, was the most senior US official to visit France since the diplomatic rift between the two countries over the war in Iraq. - (AFP)