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 British Museum recovers some of 2,000 stolen items

The British Museum, home to eight million items, has scrambled to address the loss of some 2,000 artefacts

The British Museum, home to eight million items, has scrambled to address the loss of some 2,000 artefacts

About 2,000 items are thought to have been stolen from the British Museum, but some of the missing treasures have started to be recovered, chairman George Osborne has confirmed.

The ex-chancellor accepted the museum's reputation has suffered but said "it is a mess we are going to clear up".

A leading expert in looted antiquities told the BBC the number of objects lost from the museum was "mind-blowing".

A staff member the museum suspects of involvement has been sacked.

And it was announced on Friday that Hartwig Fischer, the museum's director, will step down after accepting a 2021 investigation was mishandled.

The museum, one of the UK's most prestigious cultural institutions, has been under pressure since revealing earlier this month that a number of treasures were reported "missing, stolen or damaged".

The items involved dated from the 15th Century BC to the 19th Century AD and had been kept primarily for academic and research purposes, the museum previously said.

Mr Osborne - who was appointed as chair of the museum in June 2021 - told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that "we have already started to recover some of the stolen items".

"We believe we have been the victim of thefts over a long period of time and frankly more could have been done to prevent them," he said.

Asked where the missing items were located, he said "some members of the antiquarian community are actively cooperating with us" and that recoveries so far were a "silver lining to a dark cloud".

He said he was confident that "honest people" will return items found to have been stolen, but acknowledged that "others may not".

Founded in 1753, the British Museum has amassed a collection of around eight million items, but as of 2019 only around 80,000 were on public display, with the rest held in storage.

Mr Osborne said that not all of the items are "properly catalogued and registered" and suggested "someone with knowledge of what is not registered has a big advantage in removing" them.

The museum is working closely with the police, Mr Osborne said, adding that a "forensic job" is under way to establish precisely what is missing. He said security at the museum needed to be improved.

"It has certainly been damaging to the British Museum's reputation, that is a statement of the obvious, and that is why I'm apologising on its behalf," Mr Osborne added.

A man has been interviewed by Metropolitan Police detectives over the missing items but no arrests have been made.

Senior figures at the museum have scrambled to address how they handled the discovery of missing items after it emerged concerns about potential thefts were first raised two years ago.

Mr Osborne said "more could have been done" after theft concerns were first raised in February 2021.

Asked why they were not taken seriously, he said he did not believe there was a "cover-up" at the top of the museum, but said it was "possible" that "groupthink" among senior staff meant they "could not believe that there was an insider" stealing treasures.

Christos Tsirogiannis, a forensic archaeologist who chairs a Unesco group dedicated to illicit antiquities trafficking, described the missing-treasures scandal as the worst in modern history.

He told BBC News: "It is by far the biggest theft that I know about from a museum, especially for one of this calibre.

"It's a massive amount for any museum, but this happening at the British Museum makes it even worse."