CALCUTTA, 2 May 2004 — Police have recovered a 250-year-old copy of the Holy Qur’an from an antiques dealer in the eastern Indian city before it could be smuggled out to the Gulf.
Acting on a tip-off, Calcutta police detectives raided antiques smuggler Rajendra Verma’s home in the upmarket Alipore locality yesterday and confiscated the Holy Book.
Senior police officers said Verma revealed during interrogation that the Qur’an was stolen from a museum in Guwahati, capital of Assam, and given to him to find a buyer in Arab countries.
There are direct daily flights to Dubai, Bahrain, Amman and Muscat from Calcutta.
The two-and-a-half centuries old Qur’an has black calligraphy with gold inlays. The pages are adorned with gold-plated designs.
The police estimate its value at millions of rupees on the international antiques market.
Soumen Mitra, deputy commissioner of the detective department, said that Verma is involved in several cases of art smuggling.
Verma’s residence was raided by 10 sleuths led by Mitra. They turned the house upside down before the Holy Book was discovered inside a locked cupboard.
Experts at Calcutta’s Indian Museum confirmed that it is at least 250 years old.
The recovery comes close on the heels of the sensational theft of the Nobel gold medal belonging to India’s national poet, Rabindranath Tagore, from a museum in Santiniketan two months ago.
The high-profile case was handed over to the federal government’s Central Bureau of Investigation — India’s equivalent of FBI — but the priceless medal remains untraced.
Tired of waiting for a breakthrough, authorities at Visva Bharati, the university founded by Tagore in Santiniketan, have decided to apply to the Nobel Academy in Stockholm for a replica of the stolen medal.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who is the ex-officio chancellor of the federal-run Visva Bharati university, flew into Santiniketan to speed up the investigations but nothing happened.
