This week, Ittai Gradel, a Dutch antiquities dealer, said he had told the British Museum about the thefts two years ago and claimed that his allegations had gone unheeded.

Fischer previously claimed that he took Gradel’s allegations “seriously.” In a statement issued on Friday, Fischer changed his tune.

“Over the last few days I have been reviewing in detail the events around the thefts from the British Museum and the investigation into them,” Fischer wrote in a press statement. “It is evident that the British Museum did not respond as comprehensively as it should have in response to the warnings in 2021, and to the problem that has now fully emerged. The responsibility for that failure must ultimately rest with the Director. I also misjudged the remarks I made earlier this week about Dr Gradel. I wish to express my sincere regret and withdraw those remarks.

“The situation facing the Museum is of the utmost seriousness,” Fischer continued. “I sincerely believe it will come through this moment and emerge stronger, but sadly I have come to the conclusion that my presence is proving a distraction. That is the last thing I would want. Over the last seven years I have been privileged to work with some of the most talented and dedicated public servants. The British Museum is an amazing institution, and it has been the honour of my life to lead it.”

Fischer also said he offered his resignation to the Chairman of the Trustees, and would step down as soon as the institution’s board of trustees have established an interim leadership arrangement. The museum said its the board has accepted Fischer’s decision.

His resignation followed the museum’s announcement on August 16 of missing, stolen, and damaged items from its collection, an independent review of its security protocols, and a staff member being dismissed as a result.

News reports identified the fired staff member as veteran Greek antiquities curator Peter Higgs, who had taken “more than 1,500 items.” Antiquities had reportedly been listed on the e-commerce platform eBay for as little as $51.

Several hours after Fischer announced he would be immediately stepping down, the museum also sent out a statement that deputy director Jonathan Williams “has agreed to voluntarily step back from his normal duties until the independent review into the thefts at the Museum has concluded. This will happen with immediate effect.”

Reports from the BBC News, The New York Times and The Telegraph said Gradel had also contacted Williams, trustee Paul Ruddock, and board chairman George Osbourne in 2021 about his concerns of items from the museum’s collection were being listed on eBay. However, Williams replied to Gradel by email that a “thorough investigation” had found “no suggestion of any wrongdoing”, adding that the institution’s “collection is protected”.

On August 25, Osbourne also released a statement about Fischer’s decision to step down immediately, calling the situation a “turbulent period” and emphasizing the institution’s intention “to fix what has gone wrong”. The former Chancellor of the UK government has not received the same calls to resign from his position as Fischer or Williams.

As a result of the scandal, officials from Nigeria and Greece pressed once more for the British Museum to repatriate the institution’s Benin Bronzes and the Parthenon Marbles due to questions about their security and safety.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

“It’s shocking to hear that the countries and museums that have been telling us that the Benin Bronzes would not be secure in Nigeria, have thefts happening there,” the director of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Abba Isa Tijani, told Sky News.

On August 16, the British Museum announced that a former employee was responsible for the small pieces of “gold jewelry and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century” that had disappeared in increments from its collection. The press release did not name the fired staff member, but two UK media outlets identified them as veteran Greek antiquities curator Peter Higgs.

The institution has come under intense scrutiny after reports that the stolen items total “more than 1,500”, and were listed on the e-commerce website eBay for as little as $51. Additionally, it was revealed that senior officials were emailed detailed warnings about the thefts in 2021.

The Benin Bronzes are brass and bronze artifacts, some dating to the 16th century, that were removed from the West African kingdom of Benin (present-day Nigeria) after British forces invaded in 1897. The British Museum has a particularly large collection of “elaborately decorated cast plaques, commemorative heads, animal and human figures, items of royal regalia, and personal ornaments”, with over 900 objects and more than 100 on rotating display in its galleries.

Tijani stressed that the Benin Bronzes were illegally taken from Benin and deposited in the London museum. “It is irrespective whether they are safe there…The issue is that these are stolen artifacts, and they should be returned to Nigeria to the communities that they belong to.”

While the British Museum’s website says it has “positive relationships with the royal palace in Benin City and with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM)”, it acknowledges that the museum received a written request for their return from Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Information and Culture in October 2021.

In the interview with Sky News, Tijani also said Hannatu Musawa, Nigeria’s newly appointed minister of Arts, Culture and Creative Economy, planned to directly request the immediate repatriation of the contested artifacts.

Tijani’s comments follow recent comments from Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni about the security of another contested group of artifacts, the Parthenon Marbles. “When such incidents occur, there is obviously a question of safety and integrity [around] all of the museum’s exhibits,” she told the Greek newspaper To Vima .

Art historian Ittai Gradel, a specialist in engraved gems of the Graeco-Roman world, was told by museum director Hartwig Fischer there was “no evidence to substantiate the allegations” that missing and stolen objects from its collection were being sold on the e-commerce website eBay. British Museum deputy director Jonathan Williams also told Gradel by email that a “thorough investigation” had found “no suggestion of any wrongdoing”, adding that institution’s “collection is protected”.

The museum’s press release about the missing, stolen, and damaged items said a staffer had been fired and is being investigated, but did not name the individual.The Times of London and The Daily Telegraph identified the fired employee as Peter Higgs. The Greek and Roman antiquities curator had been employed at the museum for three decades and even served as an expert on a trafficked sculpture found by UK customs at Heathrow Airport in 2013. Members of Higgs’ family have denied the allegations.

According to the Telegraph, Gradel sent Williams a 1,600-word detailed email in February 2021, about a Roman cameo that was offered for sale in an eBay auction, as well as other ancient artifacts.

Gradel’s email, which was reviewed by the Telegraph, included a detailed description of how he had identified the seller, allegedly Higgs. Gradel said if Higgs was not the thief, it was someone else with access to the museum’s archives who was stealing items and impersonating the senior curator online.

While Williams told Gradel on March 2 that the matter would be investigated, Gradel had not received a respond by the end of June, prompting the art dealer to write a follow-up email to William and send a copy of his original email to Fischer, the museum’s director.

On July 12, 2021, Willams replied to Gradel that an investigation had found “the objects concerned are all accounted for”, and the results of a security review found “procedures are robust and that the collection is protected”. Later the same month, William also said Gradel’s allegations were “wholly unfounded”.

The Telegraph‘s report also describes in detail email correspondence between Gradel, trustee Paul Ruddock, chairman George Osbourne, and Fischer, including Fischer’s insistence the items were not missing from the collection.

Reports from The Telegraph have also said “more than 1,500” items are now being investigated, and that one item worth $64,000 was offered on eBay for as little as $51.

An eBay spokesperson told BBC News: “Our dedicated law enforcement liaison team is in close contact with the Metropolitan Police and is supporting the investigation into this case.

“eBay does not tolerate the sale of stolen property. If we identify that a listing on our site is stolen, we immediately remove it and work with law enforcement to support investigations and keep our site safe.”

Minister of Parliament Ben Bradshaw, who also served as culture secretary between 2009 and 2019, called the latest allegations against the British Museum “extremely serious”.

“These are priceless objects that belong to the nation, and they should be safe,” he told BBC News, adding the potential for damage to the country’s reputation due to media coverage around the world. “The Culture department will be wanting to assure itself from the board of trustees and George Osborne, that it has the governance in place to protect these items now and in the future, to prevent anything like this ever happening again.”

The museum’s ability to protect and secure items in its collection have already prompted questions from Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni, especially over the contested provenance of the Parthenon Marbles.

Mendoni told the Greek newspaper To Vima that “the loss, theft, [and] deterioration of objects from a museum’s collections is an extremely serious and particularly sad event” and that her office was monitoring the situation. “When such incidents occur, there is obviously a question of safety and integrity [around] all of the museum’s exhibits,” she said.

Despina Koutsoumba, president of the Association of Greek Archaeologists, also expressed concerns during an interview with BBC Radio 4. “We want to tell the British Museum that they cannot any more say that Greek culture heritage is more protected in the British Museum,” she said. “It is obvious that it is very well-protected in Greece and not in the British Museum.”

Only a few weeks before the British Museum had issued a press statement about the missing, stolen, and damaged items, it had announced that Fischer would step down as the museum’s director in 2024. While there are already discussions about the possibility of that announcement being tied to the thefts, the museum’s chairman strongly denied it, calling Hartwig a “much respected director”.

“I have been very clear – as has Hartwig – that his decision was not connected to our announcement last week,” Osbourne told BBC News.

On August 23, a museum spokesperson emailed a written statement from Fischer to ARTnews about these allegations and how the institution took them “incredibly seriously”, but also issued allegations against Gradel.

“Concerns were only raised about a small number of items, and our investigation concluded that those items were all accounted for,” Fischer wrote. “We now have reason to believe that the individual who raised concerns had many more items in his possession, and it’s frustrating that that was not revealed to us as it would have aided our investigations.”

Fischer said the museum carried out a full audit in 2022 that revealed “a bigger problem” and he reported his concerns to the institution’s trustees, resulting in a call to Metropolitan Police and the firing of a staff member.

“I am clear that at every step my priority has been the care of the incredible British Museum collection, and that continues today – with our commitment to learning lessons from the independent review, our determination to help the police with their criminal investigation, and our focus on the recovery programme.”

The year-long investigative report was published by the Washington Post on August 14. According to reporters Nicole Dungca and Claire Healy, researchers often preyed on people who were “hospitalized, poor, or lacked immediate relatives to identify or bury them.”

“In other cases,” the reporters wrote, “collectors, anthropologists and scientists dug up burial grounds and looted graves.”

The majority of the human remains in the Smithsonian were collected under the supervision of anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian’s head of physical anthropology for four decades, starting in 1903. Hrdlicka was a longtime member of the American Eugenics Society, collected thousands of body parts, including hundreds of brains, a pursuit focused on the remains of Indigenous people and people of color for what Bunch called “scientific evidence of white superiority.”

Bunch’s op-ed, published in the Post on August 20, cited his experience as a historian and acknowledged that the Smithsonian is “grappling with a legacy once deemed acceptable but that is so clearly ethically wrong today.”

“The Post’s recent coverage regarding the human remains still housed in our collections is certainly illustrative of the Smithsonian’s darkest history,” Bunch wrote. “This is our inheritance, and we accept the responsibility to address these wrongs to the fullest extent possible.”

Bunch’s apology also called the collection of human remains at the US National Museum, now known as the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, “abhorrent and dehumanizing.” He acknowledged that this was “carried out under the Smithsonian’s name.”

“As secretary of the Smithsonian, I condemn these past actions and apologize for the pain caused by Hrdlicka and others at the institution who acted unethically in the name of science, regardless of the era in which their actions occurred.”

While Bunch said the Smithsonian has been repatriating objects and human remains from its our collections prior to the passing of the National Museum of the American Indian Act in 1989, he also noted that the institution is still in the process of developing a policy that would address the future of all human remains, through a specific task force established earlier this year.

“Our forthcoming policy will finally recognize these remains not as objects to be studied but as human beings to be honored,” Bunch wrote. “It is a long-overdue shift, and I regret that human bodies were ever treated with such disrespect at our institution.”

The Post’s investigation also highlighted specific cases of brains coming from Indigenous Filipino individuals that were brought to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Bunch wrote in his op-ed that the Smithsonian was in discussions with the Philippine government and the National Museum of the Philippines on the future of those human remains.

Notably, Bunch said it was critical that the Smithsonian “let the wishes of each community steer the process” of repatriation as part of a commitment to “interrogating and dismantling the racism that inspired these collections in the first place,” even with any accompanying legal and logistical challenges.

“Museums and universities throughout the world are contending with their own human remains collections. We are determined to be at the forefront of a long-overdue reckoning about ethical returns and repatriation.”

While the museum has not released an official figure, photos, or descriptions of the items, the Telegraph said its sources told the UK publication that the true number of antiquities being investigated is well over 1,000—and perhaps “closer to 2,000.”

Some of the missing items, described by the museum as small pieces of “gold jewellery and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century,” were not digitally catalogued by the museum, making their loss more difficult to track. The British Museum said the artifacts were kept primarily for academic and research purposes, and that none had been recently on display.

The Telegraph said the extent of the loss will “intensify calls for Hartwig Fischer, the British Museum director, to resign immediately,” rather than next year, as previously announced. The museum issued its press release about the missing, stolen, and damaged items on August 16, only a few weeks after director Fischer announced he would be leaving his position.

The Telegraph also reported that museum deputy director Jonathan Williams “personally warned about the thefts in February 2021” but his position “is now untenable.”

Roman art expert Reverend Martin Henig told the Telegraph, “This is the worst case that I’ve come across like this because it involves not just selling the odd object, but also destruction. This is totally unforgivable.”

While the British Museum did not disclose which staffer was fired due to the discovery of the missing, stolen, and damaged items, the Greek antiquities curator Peter Higgs was identified by the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph.

Higgs is suspected to have taken uncategorized items and selling them on the e-commerce website eBay. One item worth $64,000 was offered for online auction for as little as $51 and listings for artifacts from the museum’s collection appeared online as early as 2016, according to a report in the Telegraph.

While no arrests have been made yet in the investigation over the missing items, the British Museum’s press statement said it would be taking legal action against the former staff member and that the Metropolitan Police’s Economic Crime Command is also looking into what happened.

The museum’s statement also announced an independent review into its security protocols, which were already the subject of a scathing Sunday Times investigation in 2002.

A spokesperson for the British Museum told ARTnews: “We cannot and won’t comment on the thefts while a police investigation is ongoing.”

The museum’s announcement on August 16 said the majority of the missing, stolen, and damaged items were small pieces of “gold jewellery and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century” that were were kept primarily for academic and research purposes. None of them had been recently on display.

However, some of the missing items had been appearing in listings on eBay since at least 2016, with the Telegraph reporting that an antiquities expert told the British Museum three years ago that they suspected a member of staff was stealing pieces from its collection that were in storage.

In 2016, a piece of Roman jewelry made from the semi-precious stone onyx was listed for sale on eBay with a minimum price of £40. The listing attracted no bids. One dealer told the Telegraph its true value was between $31,890 and $63,780 (£25,000 and £50,000).

As a result of the discovery of the stolen, missing, and damaged items, the museum has launched an independent review into its security protocols. It also announced that it would take legal action against a fired staff member and that an investigation by the Metropolitan Police’s Economic Crime Command was underway.

Shortly after the museum announced the firing, the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph both identified Greek antiquities curator Peter Higgs as the unnamed person.

Prior to his dismissal from the museum earlier this year, Higgs had worked at the institution for more than 30 years, organizing major exhibitions and writing books. His family told the Telegraph he was innocent and that he was “devastated” at the loss of his high-profile position.

Ironically, in 2013, Higgs served as an expert on a trafficked artifact after UK customs officials asked the British Museum for assistance in helping identify a statue that had been seized at Heathrow Airport. Higgs told the Guardian he knew right away it was a 2,000-year-old marble statue of a Greek goddess. The rare funerary statue was repatriated to Libya in 2021.

The London-based Red Eight Galleries is brokering the deal between the owner of the townhouse property in the British city of Margate where the mural was painted, and Showpiece, a fractional ownership platform.

The mural has an estimated value of $7.64 million (£6 million) through an evaluation by Robin Barton of Bankrobber gallery. The fractional ownership sale of Valentine’s Day Mascara will take place on August 22 with a total of 27,000 shares.

“Realistically, we are looking to achieve between £1m and £1.5m,” Usher told the Art Newspaper, which first reported the news of the sale.

The mural features a 1950s-style housewife with a swollen, black eye, a bruised cheek, a swollen lower lip, and a knocked-out tooth. She wears a bright blue gingham dress, an apron, and yellow latex gloves, and has her arms out.

She was initially shown standing next to an open chest freezer and an upturned plastic lawn chair. The woman appeared to have disposed of an abusive male partner. Only the man’s pant cuffs, black socks, and black dress shoes could be seen poking out of the appliance.

The mural was removed twice in Margate, first by officials from the Thanet district council, then by workers after the owner of the property where the mural was painted called a London gallery for assistance.

Red Eight Galleries CEO Julian Usher told ITV News that the installation of Plexiglas and the removal of the chest freezer were both for security reasons, citing the high cost of guards to protect it around the clock.

While Banksy confirmed the work was genuine on Instagram, Usher said the mural had not been authenticated by the artist’s studio Pest Control. “The lack of authentication means we can’t take it to an auction house,” he told the Art Newspaper. “There is a grey secondary market for these pieces, but in the current financial market, those people are just not there”.

Historically, Banksy and Pest Control do not condone the sale of any work taken out of its original context, with only a few exceptions. Even without that stamp of approval, the mural Crowbar girl was sold for an estimated $2.4 million to a private buyer after it was extracted from the wall of an electric shop in November 2021.

Currently, the mural is on display at the amusement park Dreamland Margate and an agreement has been reached with the owner to show it there for at least 12 months. Usher told the Art Newspaper he spent two months sourcing experts to properly remove the work from the building, which took place at the end of April, at a total cost of nearly $250,000 (£195,000).

The plan is for Valentine’s Day Mascara to remain on display for at least 24 months at Dreamland Margate, where it has been on temporary view since June.

Some of the proceeds of the sales the fractional ownership shares will go to the very cause depicted in Valentine’s Day Mascara. Showpiece has agreed to donate some of the proceeds to the UK domestic violence charity Refuge. The owner of the mural has also pledged a six-figure sum to Oasis, a charity in Margate which supports families seeking to leave and recover from domestic abuse.

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events posted an alert on its website about construction on Grainger Plaza that started this week, limiting public access and views of Cloud Gate, more often known as the Bean, until spring 2024.

“This necessary maintenance by the City of Chicago will replace pavers and make other repairs and accessibility upgrades to the Plaza—to enhance the nearly 20-year-old Park’s appearance, visitor experience, and position as the #1 attraction in the Midwest,” the department wrote.

Cloud Gate (2006) is 33 feet high, 42 feet wide, and 66 feet long, making it one of world’s largest public art installations. The $23 million sculpture is comprised of 168 stainless steel plates welded together and then polished to a mirror finish, making it extremely popular for selfies and other photographs.

In 2017, the British-Indian artist told ARTnews about his complicated feelings about the sculpture’s popularity and its ability to incite strong opinions.

“When I first did Cloud Gate in Chicago, I saw those pictures of hundreds of people around the piece and I thought, ‘Oh God, what have I done? Is this Disneyland?'” he said. “So I decided to go to Chicago to try to understand what’s really going on there. It didn’t take me long to understand that actually there is something mysterious about that object, and its mystery is to do with its scale. And that comes down to just one simple fact: it has no joints.”

Cloud Gate has also been a featured location for several television shows and movies, including Chicago Med, The Break-Up, Source Code, The Vow, The Beast, and the fourth installment of the film franchise “Transformers.”

The popularity of Cloud Gate has led Kapoor to accuse the Chinese city of Karamay of plagiarism in 2015 and to sue the National Rifle Association of America for copyright infringement after the group included an image of the sculpture in two videos. There is now a smaller version by the artist that finally opened earlier this year at the base of a luxury residential tower in Manhattan after years of delays.

US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Pace and US Attorney Claire S. Kedeshian filed a three-page Bill of Particulars for the forfeiture of a JP Morgan Chase bank account with a balance of more than $2 million, two artworks by Dan McCarthy, three paintings and two sculptures by Alex Brewer (also known as Hense), four sculptures by Mark Whalen, a sculpture by Joankim Ojanen, a 2.4-carat “green diamond cushion modified brilliant cut ring,” and 34 other diamonds.

The items, which would only be subject to forfeiture if Said Ahmad were convicted, were all owned by companies mentioned in the nine-count indictment unsealed earlier this year in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The document also includes various allegations against Said Ahmad, accusing him of conspiring to defraud the United States and other governments, evading customs laws, and money laundering for the benefit of Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah.

Ahmad has been sanctioned by the US government since 2019 for his role as a major financial donor to Hezbollah through money laundering activities, as well as for personally providing funds to the organization’s secretary-general. He was barred from conducting business—such as collecting and selling “high-value art,” real estate, and diamonds—with US entities and persons.

The indictment further alleged that Ahmad and his associates obtained artwork worth more than $1.2 million from the US after he was sanctioned in 2019, but noted that amount did not account for the tax evasion from foreign governments. By comparison, the indictment said the total weight and value of the diamonds, which had allegedly passed through Ahmad’s businesses after the sanctions had been imposed in 2019, were graded at approximately 1,546 carats and were worth more than $91 million.

Prior to the Bill of Particulars filing on August 16, the US government had already already sought the forfeiture of more than 450 diamonds and more than 100 pieces of artwork.

The indictment did not identify the names of artists and galleries involved, only referring to them by sales amounts and location, such as “Chicago Art Gallery-1.” However, three of the works in the indictment had been posted to Ahmad’s Instagram account, where he frequently published images of artists, galleries, and exhibitions to his 172,000 followers. Ahmad previously identified those paintings as works by Nicasio Fernandez and Luke Agada. The Instagram account is no longer online.

Using Google reverse image search on artworks attached to the indictment, several of the works appear to be artists David Salle, Terron Cooper Sorrells, Stickmonger, and UFO907; per the indictment, these pieces were paid for or acquired through other names, entities, or partial payments to obscure they were connected to Ahmad.

Higgs is suspected to have taken uncategorized items and selling them on the e-commerce website eBay. Listings for artifacts from the museum’s collection appeared online as early as 2016, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph.

The museum’s press announcement on August 16 said the majority of the missing, stolen, and damaged items were small pieces of “gold jewellery and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century” that were were kept primarily for academic and research purposes. None of them had been recently on display.

Higgs began working at the British Museum in 1993 after visiting it regularly as a child. Before Higgs was fired earlier this year, he was the museum’s head of department for Greece and Rome. Higgs was also the lead curator of the 2021 exhibition “Ancient Greeks: Athletes, Warriors and Heroes,” which has also toured three Australian museums and is scheduled for the Suzhou Museum in China at the end of this year.

The report from the Daily Telegraph said an unnamed antiquities expert informed the museum of the illegal activity three years ago. News of the missing, stolen and damage items was released by the museum only a few weeks after director Hartwig Fischer announced he would be leaving his position next year.

The Telegraph’s report also said that while earlier pieces sold by Higgs had not been comprehensively catalogued by the museum, other items were and could be traced back to a digital inventory, helping identify him as the alleged thief. While Higgs used a pseudonym to sell items on eBay, a portal on his Paypal account linked to his Twitter feed, where he used his real name.

Ironically, in 2013, Higgs used his expertise with a high-profile artifact after UK customs officials asked the British Museum for assistance in helping identify a statue that had been seized at Heathrow Airport. Higgs told the Guardian he knew right away it was a 2,000-year-old marble statue of a Greek goddess. The rare funerary statue was repatriated to Libya in 2021.

No arrests have been made yet in the investigation over the missing items, but the British Museum’s press statement said it would be taking legal action against the former staff member and that the Metropolitan Police’s Economic Crime Command is also looking into what happened.

The museum’s statement also announced an independent review into its security protocols, prompting questions about the safety of other items in its collection, especially ones with contested provenance.

Art Recovery International, a UK-based law firm specializing in restitution and repatriation cases, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter: “Perhaps the Parthenon Marbles are not safe in the UK after all. They should be moved to a museum in Athens where they can be well cared for…”

Experts are already concerned the missing, stolen, and damaged items have been melted down, recut, or sent abroad. Art Recovery International CEO Christopher Marinello said the length of time that has passed since the discovery of the thefts at the museum severely reduced the likelihood of their recovery. Marinello told the Telegraph that “unsophisticated” criminals who steal works of art are typically focused on “quick cash” and destroy the pieces in the process.

“They will tend to melt down gold as quickly as possible, and have the gems recut,” he said, referring to the $18 million outdoor statute Reclining Figure by Henry Moore stolen from the artist’s foundation in 2005 and believed to have been “melted down for the value of the raw metal.”