JEDDAH, 5 March 2004 - Ten days after a break-in at the Jouf museum, Jeddah's regional museum has also fallen victim to a robbery.
The Jeddah Museum, in the city's historic Balad district, was robbed of a number of priceless antique coins and doubloons.
Police are already looking for a suspect, a janitor who also cleans and maintains the museum's cars. The display case had been smashed open, and two of the missing pieces were later found in one of the cars.
The janitor, a Bangladeshi, disappeared soon after museum officials contacted the authorities and is still at large.
Mohammed Al-Shareef, 30, an asset protection specialist, believes the robbery was an inside job. "Based on the details it does look very obvious, unless the janitor is being set up, and that is highly unlikely," he said.
Seventy percent of all thefts from businesses are committed by their own employees, he said.
Al-Shareef added in-store security in the Kingdom is virtually non-existent compared to the United States, partly because the crime rate here remains low.
But Sami Nawar, who is in charge of the conservation of Jeddah's old town, disagrees. "The Jeddah Museum has got the latest in surveillance technology, 24-hour security, and all our displays are wired with a state-of-the-art alarm system," he said.
In the Jouf museum robbery the door was smashed open and 100 golden coins dating back to the Ottoman Empire were taken. In the rush to flee the scene the burglars left behind four of the priceless pieces.
Security at the Jouf Museum was by all accounts lax. The museum has one security guard working a 17-hour shift and leaving the museum unprotected for the remainder of the evening, which is when the thieves pounced. Many of the coins at the Jouf Museum were listed by UNESCO as historical artifacts, which make the pieces hard to sell or smuggle abroad.
In June 2002, thousands of rare and priceless works of art were destroyed in a massive fire at the Abdul Rauf Hasan Khalil Museum in Jeddah. It contained some 13,500 Islamic, international and Saudi artifacts, some dating back to the Stone Age. The damage has been estimated at SR101 million.
