National treasures stolen

TRIPOLI (AP):

Moammar Gadhafi's forces tried to flee Tripoli with a sack of ancient Roman artefacts in hopes of selling them abroad to help fund their doomed fight, Libya's new leaders said yesterday as they displayed the recovered objects for the first time.

The director of the state antiquities department, Saleh Algabe, hailed the find of 17 pieces, mostly small stone heads, as an important recovery of national treasures.

The pieces included a female figurine evocative of ancient fertility symbols, several small-stone human heads and two ornate terracotta fragments. Algabe said the figurines were likely used in pagan worship and dated back to the second and third centuries A.D., when a swathe of North Africa belonged to the Roman Empire.

Seized on the road

Algabe said the pieces were seized from a car on the road to Tripoli's airport in August as revolutionary forces were sweeping into the capital. It appeared Gadhafi's forces wanted to smuggle them out of the country and sell them at auction to fund their fight, he said. Officials did not know how much the objects were worth.

The pieces probably do not represent a major component of Libya's wealth of artefacts from the Roman era. Still, officials played up their recovery as significant.

Khalid Alturjman, a representative from the country's National Transitional Council, said the anti-Gadhafi's fighters' seizure of them stands as "a great example of the sacrifice of these revolutionary men for this country".

He formally handed them over to the antiquities department yesterday.

Algabe stressed that although they dated to the Roman era, they exhibited clear signs of local influence.

This confirms the role of Libyans in civilisation, he said.