“I feel like I am working alone and that I alone spend time thinking of how to manage cultural affairs,” the minister Farouk Hosni told daily paper Al-Masry Al-Youm on Tuesday.
“I can’t work with these incompetent employees,” he said. “I’m tired and I can’t sleep, because I wake up in the middle of the night fearing for the artifacts and the museums.”
The painting, known as “Poppy Flower” according to a statement in Arabic, was stolen on Saturday morning from Cairo’s Mahmoud Khalil Museum. An early investigation of the theft showed “flagrant shortcomings” in security, with only seven out of 43 security cameras working properly, state media saidHosni said staff at the museum were guilty of negligence. “The painting would have been stolen even if there were a thousand surveillance cameras, because of the negligence of the museum staff,” Hosni was cited as saying by Al-Akhbar newspaper.
The Culture Ministry’s head of fine art, Mohsen Shaalan, has been detained along with four other officials pending investigation for 19 days after being accused of “negligence and failing to carry out their employment duties.”
Nine other employees were
barred from travel.
Hosni said the ministry
would create a central control room to monitor all museums, supervised by his
cabinet, and set up a committee to review surveillance of museums across the
country.
"We are currently
setting up an additional 18 museums and they will all be supplied with state of
the art security sensors against theft and fires," Zahi Hawass,
secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt, said.
