BAGHDAD, 19 April 2003 — US troops committed the cultural “crime of the century” when they failed to protect priceless Iraqi artifacts from looters and likely trampled archaeological sites during the invasion, top antiquities officials here charged yesterday. They also said a small number of “valuable” missing museum pieces were returned after appeals by Muslim religious leaders, but denied reports from a UN conference that Iraqi officials may have been involved in an organized theft.

“With what I’m expecting has happened in the (archeological) sites in the field and what happened to the Iraq museum, I would say it’s the crime of the century because it is really affecting the heritage of mankind,” said the head of the National Archaeological Museum in Baghdad, Donny George. “It looks like there was an action and there were other priorities (for the United States) besides the Baghdad Museum,” George told reporters at a briefing about the firestorm over last Friday’s ransacking of the museum. US troops who seized the Iraqi capital on April 9 watched as looters carted away artifacts from some of the world’s oldest civilizations.

Under pressure after the museum looting, the United States is sending FBI agents to the Iraqi capital to help with the recovery effort. But the head of President US George W. Bush’s cultural advisory committee has already stepped down in protest at the American failure to prevent the “tragedy.” Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller said agents had been sent to investigate the looting and to help improve security in Iraqi cities where there have been widespread troubles since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime. “We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure these treasures for the people of Iraq,” Mueller said. He did not say how many agents were involved.

But the chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property quit after eight years in the post, saying the devastation of a Baghdad museum was a “tragedy” and a result of US negligence. “The reports in recent days about the looting of Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquities and the destruction of countless artifacts that document the cradle of Western civilization have troubled me deeply, a feeling that is shared by many other Americans,” wrote Martin Sullivan in a letter.

Jaber Khalil Ibrahim, head of Iraq’s General Directorate of Antiquities, said the US and British governments should make amends by preventing any of the antiquities from leaving the country and “look for the objects that will pop up in Switzerland, England, America, Israel and Japan and send them back.”

Ibrahim agreed with an assessment by a UNESCO conference of experts called in Paris on Thursday to examine the war damage to Iraq’s heritage that organized gangs which traffic in works of ancient art were involved in the thefts. He noted that some of the pieces, such as a 5,000-year-old Sumerian alabaster vase — known as the Warka vase, which weighs 300 kilograms (660 pounds) — would need several people to be have been removed.

In the gallery, the only items left were ones too heavy to carry, he added. “I suspect they really did (know what they were looking for) and that they were especially looking for Sumerian valuable material,” Ibrahim said. But he denied eyewitness reports from the UNESCO meeting which described some of the looters as directed by well-dressed men who had keys to the vaults where they believed the most highly valued items were kept.

The Iraqi officials confirmed among the other major thefts were the Sumerian vase of Uruk and Akkadian bronze statue of Basitki. A famed 4,000-year-old Sumerian Ur harp was stripped of its gold and badly damaged. A collection of some 80,000 cuneiform tablets with examples of the some of the world’s earliest writing was also taken, and a number of Roman statues were smashed and their heads are missing.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported yesterday that the war in Iraq and the feelings it has stirred in the Islamic world has forced the cancellation or postponement of hundreds of research trips by US scholars to the region. Experts told the daily it is the greatest interruption of overseas study since World War II.

In some cases, academic institutions or researchers themselves have canceled trips in response to State Department warnings of danger, the Times reported.