Through a way that no one would have thought, Kim Kardashian photo at Met Gala 2018 helped to solve the mystery of a stolen artifact (object or object of cultural or historical interest made by man).
A photo taken viral at the time showed Kim posing in Nedjemankh's golden coffin - the ancient Egyptian coffin where Nedjemankh's mum, a priest of the ram god Heryshaf - was held - leading to the conclusion of a lengthy criminal case involving the artifact golden.
In an episode of Ben Lewis's podcast (via the New York Post) "Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art World," he tells how the photograph played a role in capturing thieves who stole Nedjemankh's coffin and sold it to the Museum. Metropolitan of Arts (Met) for $ 4 million using fake documents.
The investigation began because an anonymous person from the Middle East, after the photo of Kim Kardashian near the coffin, informed the prosecutor's office in Manhattan. He was grown up because he was never paid for the fact that he pulled out the coffin seven years ago.
Një hetim tregoi se grabitësit e vodhën arkivolin në vitin 2011, duke gërmuar varrin. Pastaj në vitin 2013 ia dërguan Hassan Fazeli, një tregtari të sendeve antike në Sharjah, një qytet në Emiratet e Bashkuara Arabe. Sipas podkastit, Fazeli shkroi një formë eksporti ku ai e etiketoi gabimisht arkivolin si greko-romak për të mbuluar origjinën e vërtetë. Reliku më pas iu shit Roben Dib, menaxher i Galerisë Dionysos në Hamburg, Gjermani. Dib ndërtoi procesin e restaurimit dhe dyshohet se falsifikoi një licencë eksporti egjiptiane ku shkruhej se ishte arkivoli i Nedjemankh dhe ishte eksportuar ligjërisht në vitin 1971.
And so the chain went on. The coffin was then sent to French antiquities researcher and merchant Christophe Kunicki and his colleague Richard Semper. Whether they knew the origin of the coffin remains unclear. They sold it to the Met for over $ 4 million.
But the robbers had mistakenly left a finger bone inside the coffin when the artifact arrived at the Met. The gold-plated coffin was sent to Cairo in 2019. Met executive director Daniel Weiss apologized to the Egyptian people.
"After learning that the museum was a victim of fraud and inadvertently participated in the illegal antiques trade, we worked for his return to Egypt," Weiss said in a statement.
