American professor calls to shoot marauders in Iraq

Marauders systematically rob many of the 10 thousand Iraqi archaeological excavations, and the coalition troops must shoot them on the spot, the expert said. According to The Daily Telegraph (translation on the website inopressa.ru ), gangs, the number of which reaches 400 people, steal antiquities for the international market, and many archaeological sites have undergone significant destruction, the American professor of archeology Elizabeth Stone said.

“I would like to see helicopters flying over the sites and shooting so that people know what the real reckoning for the theft of these items,” said Professor Stone from New York University Stonei Brook. “I will have to kill in order to end this.”

Professor Stone, who performed at a meeting of the conference of the British Museum, dedicated to thefts of antiquities by looters, said that treasures were abducted in such quantities that thieves are held by specialized local markets.

However, having recently visited Iraq, she found that the coalition troops were reluctant to engage in similar markets, since they do not have the right to arrest violators, and the soldiers are "afraid that they will be killed."

The abducted antiquities smuggled to the international market, where buyers are mostly European, including British collectors.

According to Professor Stone, good lawyers are available to rich collectors, so they are rarely pursued for the possession of stolen objects of antiquity.

"In addition to Babylon and Hurray, many other archaeological sites were looted. Marauded at excavations before the first war in the Persian Gulf of Persian rarely happened, but after the second war it goes on an increase in, and there are no structures capable of excavations. Some sites are completely destroyed"

Dr. Navalaal Mutavalli, director of the Baghdad National Museum, said that at least 10 percent of the exhibits were gone. About 13 thousand items disappeared from the storerooms, from the main exposition - only 47. "Seven of them are masterpieces of great importance," he said.