<iframe src="//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-PWMWG4" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden">

Features

Why thefts at the British Museum are nothing new

Two unrelated cases in the 1990s show how hard it was to recover stolen artefacts – and even to know that they had gone missing in the first place

2 March 2026