Sacred temple sculptures that were smuggled into the United States are among the 1,440 antiquities that Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg has returned to India.

According to the prosecutor's office, Alexandra de Armas, the Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) Group Supervisor, returned the artifacts to India's Consulate General at a ceremony on Thursday, represented by Consul Manish Kulhary.


Bragg declared, "We will keep looking into the various trafficking networks that have targeted Indian cultural heritage."

According to the prosecutor's office, the pieces were found during investigations into criminal trafficking networks, including those of antiquities traffickers Nancy Wiener, convicted in the United States, and Subash Kapoor, convicted in India.
HSI New York Special Agent in Charge William S. Walker stated, "Today's repatriation marks another victory in what has been a multi-year, international investigation into antiquities trafficked by one of history's most prolific offenders."

Before being confiscated by the Manhattan prosecutor's Antiquities Traffic Unit (ATU), some of the antiques had been on exhibit in museums.


They are worth ten million dollars.

According to the prosecutor's office, a warrant has been issued in New York for the arrest of Kapoor, the alleged ringleader of the antiquities smugglers network, and his extradition from India is still pending.

One of the returned sculptures, which was taken from a Madhya Pradesh temple in the early 1980s, shows a Celestial Dancer.
In order to sell it, looters cut it in two and smuggled it to New York via London.

In 2023, the ATU confiscated it from the New York Metropolitan Museum (Met), where it had been donated by one of Kapoor's clients.


Another was the Tanesar Mother Goddess, which Wiener had at her gallery in New York after it was stolen from the Rajasthani village of Tanesara-Mahadeva in the early 1960s.

It went through two collectors before being acquired by the ATU in 2022 and then added to the Met's collection in 1993.

These artifacts were the most recent in a string of attempts by US officials to return stolen artifacts to India.

Soon after, the Manhattan prosecutor's office turned over 105 antiquities to India.

In 2022, Bragg gave the consulate general 307 items worth approximately $4 million.


"Kapoor was one of the world's most prolific antiquities traffickers," Bragg said at the time.

In 2011, as part of Operation Hidden Idol, Kapoor, who operated an art gallery in New York, was arrested in Germany and extradited to India.

In 2022, a court in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, sentenced him to ten years in prison for stealing a sacred statue from a temple.