An Egyptian doctor who was arrested five years ago for importing hundreds of artifacts into the US without declaring them on customs forms has been sentenced to six months in prison by a federal court judge.
On August 27, Ashraf Omar Eldarir was given the sentence by United States District Judge Rachel P. Kovner after an investigation recovered more than 600 Egyptian artifacts were recovered after they were transported to the US on flights from Cairo to JFK Airport in New York in 2019 and early 2020.
The artifacts included a polychrome relief; an ancient Roman limestone stele later sold at auction for $1,000; and an ancient Roman limstone head later sold at auction for $1,300.
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Earlier this year in February, Eldarir plead guilty to four counts of smuggling Egyptian artifacts.
A document filed on August 14 by assistant federal defenders Kannan Sundaram and Jullian Harris-Calvin stated, “On each of the 2019 flights Mr. Eldarir brought a single artifact in his luggage; on the 2020 flight he brought approximately 590 artifacts in three checked-in suitcases.”
On the flight in January 2020, Eldarir had declared to Customs and Border Patrol officers he was carrying goods valued at only $300. CBP officers found 590 artifacts bubble and foam-wrapped in the three suitcases, “a seizure that constitutes JFK’s largest seizure of smuggled antiquities to date”, US attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. stated in a sentencing memorandum filed on August 20.
“When the wrapping was opened, loose sand and dirt spilled out of the packaging, indicating that the artifacts had been recently excavated,” stated a press release from the US Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York. “Among the items recovered by law enforcement officers were gold amulets from a funerary set and wooden tomb model figures with linen garments dating to approximately 1900 BCE. Eldarir was also in possession of a kit of materials used to fabricate documentation for the stolen items.”
The US attorney’s office also called Eldarir a “prolific” trafficker of ancient Egyptian artifacts and noted that each of the four times Eldarir smuggled artifacts into the US, he used fake provenances to sell those artifacts at U.S.-based auction houses.
These false provenances included “multiple documents, including what appeared to be decades-old Egyptian blank pages with watermarks, decades-old Egyptian loose stamps, and multiple black-and-white old-looking photographs purporting to depict an ancestor of the defendant displaying several of the artifacts in his office from long ago,” stated court documents, which noted forensic examiners determined the documents were forgeries and the photographs had been photoshopped and aged.
“The defendant looted Egypt’s cultural treasures and lied to U.S. Customs about them as part of a web of deception he spun to illegally fill his pockets with cash,” Nocella stated in a press release from the US Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York. “Those who steal cultural treasures of other countries and smuggle them into the United States should know that they will be held accountable for their crimes. We commend our HSI and CBP partners for their diligent and important work in this case and look forward to repatriating to Egypt the recovered antiquities.”
The news of the prison sentence was first reported by The National.