On April 28, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., announced the return of 657 trafficked antiquities to the people of India. The items, valued at nearly $14 million, were recovered in the course of ongoing investigations by the D.A.’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and Homeland Security investigations.
The items were formally returned at a ceremony in New York, which was attended by representatives from the D.A.’s office and the Consulate General of India. “The scale of the trafficking networks that targeted cultural heritage in India is massive, as demonstrated by the return of more than 600 pieces today,” said District Attorney Bragg. “There is unfortunately more work to be done to return stolen artifacts back to India, and I thank our team for their persistent efforts.”
Among the recovered pieces is a bronze figure of the Buddhist deity Avalokiteshvara, valued at $2 million. One of a trove of 7th–8th century bronzes found in 1939 at the Sirpur archeological site in India, it later entered the collection of the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum in Raipur. By 1982 it had been stolen from the museum and smuggled into the United States; it ultimately ended up in a private collection in New York, from which it was seized in 2025 by the D.A.’s office.
Also returned was a red sandstone figure of a standing Buddha from northern India, valued at $7.5 million. This statue was smuggled into New York by Subhash Kapoor, a former Manhattan-based art dealer convicted in 2022 in India for running a decades-long antiquities trafficking operation and currently awaiting extradition to the U.S. It was recovered by the District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit from one of Kapoor’s New York storage units.
The repatriation also included a sandstone sculpture of a dancing Ganesha, the Hindu elephant-headed god, which was looted by convicted trafficker Vaman Ghiya and shipped to New York-based gallery owner Doris Wiener. After Wiener’s death, her daughter Nancy—later convicted by the D.A.’s office of antiquities trafficking—created a false provenance for the piece and sold it in 2012 through Christie’s auction house. The person who purchased it surrendered it to the D.A. earlier this year.
The Antiquities Trafficking Unit has been investigating Kapoor and his associates’ looting, exportation, and sale of Southeast and South Asian artifacts for over a decade. In 2012, it obtained an arrest warrant for Kapoor, and in 2019, it secured the convictions of five of his co-conspirators.
To date, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit has recovered more than 6,200 cultural treasures, including rare books, works of art, and antiquities, valued at more than $485 million, and returned more than 5,900 of those to 36 countries.
