The Iraqi National Museum has found more than 600 missing artefacts found in a storeroom of the prime minister's office, two years after the US government returned them to Iraq, officials have said.
Most of the artefacts were among some 15,000 relics looted during the conflict that followed the 2003 US-led invasion that ousted former president Saddam Hussein.
"We found these artefacts in one of the storerooms of the prime minister's [Nuri al-Maliki] office along with some kitchen appliances. When we opened the boxes we found them," Qahtan al-Jibouri, Iraq's Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, told AFP news agency on Monday.
The items, some dating to the third millennium BC, had been stored in a warehouse alongside common kitchen utensils, after being repatriated by the US military.
"When they arrived in Baghdad, the US army handed them over to the prime minister's office, but the transfer was conducted without any representatives for antiquities and heritage in attendance," Qahtan Abbas Numan, the tourism and archaeology minister told a news conference at the National Museum in the capital Baghdad.
Numan also said that the boxes they had been transported in were also not properly labelled, so they were stored in a warehouse from autumn 2008.
Read more at english.aljazeera.net
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