The Manhattan District Attorney’s office returned two Khmer artefacts to representatives of the Cambodian government on 26 March. The two stone sculptures were recovered as part of a larger criminal investigation into trafficking networks specialised in Cambodian antiquities, including those tied to the smuggler and disgraced dealer Subhash Kapoor, whose dealings in artefacts from South and Southeast Asia led to his arrest by the DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit in 2012.
The two objects repatriated in Wednesday’s ceremony at the DA’s office date from the 11th and 12th centuries CE. The older object, an artefact from the Khmer Empire known as “Head of a Ruler”, is a relic rendered in the Angkor style, the opulent architectural movement that gave the former Khmer capital, Angkor Wat, its signature style. Angkor’s sprawling metropolis of over a thousand Hindu temples is now an Unesco World Heritage site, attracting up to two million visitors every year. The Head of a Ruler shows signs of recent damage, suggesting it was violently removed from its original setting and smuggled to the United States through a complex network of dealers and appraisers.
The 12th-century sculpture, referred to as the “Grey Sandstone Torso”, depicts a male figure. Originally rendered with four arms, the Torso hails from the Baphuon period, an era defined by the Khmer culture’s shift from Hinduism to Buddhism. Excavated from the ancient temple of Prasat Bavel, the item was held in Cambodia’s Wat Po Veal Museum in Battambang until the onset of the Cambodian Civil War in 1970, when it was moved to a warehouse for safekeeping. In 1985, the Torso was found to have gone missing. Records showed that its last public appearance had been in 1981, at an auction house in London, where it was purchased by a US collector. The Torso remained in the collector’s private holdings until his death, when it was sold at auction in New York City in 2024, at which time the Antiquities Trafficking Unit seized the object.
“I am pleased that we have been able to return more than 30 pieces to Cambodia in just the past several years”, Bragg said in a statement. “That is a testament to the outstanding work of our investigators and prosecutors, and I thank them for their continued efforts to dismantle these smuggling rings”.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office and Homeland Security Investigations have recovered more than 2,500 objects linked to Kapoor and his former gallery on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, Art of the Past, since 2011. In the ensuing years they have been repatriated to their countries of origin, with US officials returning dozens—sometimes hundreds—of artefacts to countries including Pakistan, India, Nepal and Cambodia.
In 2019, authorities in the US charged Kapoor with 86 criminal counts of grand larceny, possession of stolen property and conspiracy to defraud. Kapoor’s extradition back to the US from India—where he was sentenced to ten years in prison in 2022—is still pending, but five other individuals related to his network have been convicted.
