The National Police has recovered 71 looted archaeological pieces that had been exhibited in a gallery in Barcelona. These are fragments from the Visigoth, Nasrid, Caliphate and Renaissance periods valued at more than 403,000 euros. Once the investigation, which lasted for two years, was concluded, the Police arrested six people, five in Granada and one in Barcelona, ??who are accused of a crime against historical heritage, membership in a criminal group and money laundering.
Agents from the Historical Heritage Brigade had their alarms set off when they attended Feriarte 2021, a large antiques and art gallery fair held in Madrid. At a stand they spotted a caliphal-style capital that caught their attention because similar pieces with illicit origin had recently appeared on the market. From here, the agents asked the exhibitors to certify the origin of the capital and noted that they had acquired it in a store in Granada along with two other capitals for which they had issued an invoice with irregularities: without a number and without breaking down the amount. of VAT.
In addition, each archaeological piece must be accompanied by a notarial act proving ownership. Three minutes of notarial statements were provided in the name of the same person and which had been prepared by a notary office in Granada. Those documents described the origin and ownership of the capitals, emphasizing that they had been inherited and had been in the family’s possession for several generations, since an ancestor had been a restorer in the Alhambra in the 19th century. However, the agents found it suspicious that the origin of the objects was not proven and they began to intervene. One of the tricks that this group used was to try to justify, even if it were a lie, that the piece came from a family inheritance in order to justify that the object had been removed from the site before the Historical Heritage Law of 1985 came into force. that vetoes these practices and prohibits private ownership of archaeological elements.
The police pulled the string and arrived at an antiques store in Barcelona. They recovered some pieces from individuals in Valencia, Madrid and Granada but the majority were in a specialized gallery in Barcelona. The person in charge of the establishment provided an outlet for the looted objects through his business. The plot, however, was directed from Granada by three brothers who ran an antiques business in that city. They looked for looted pieces of archeology and when they located them, they prepared the necessary documentation for each piece to give it a past that would allow it to be introduced into the legal market, which is the one that produces the greatest profits. They signed purchase and sale contracts in the names of front men and sometimes moved the pieces to the Barcelona gallery so that they would not be related to the rest of the organization.
Among the 71 pieces intervened there are capitals from the Nasrid and Caliphate periods, bases, columns, plasterwork arches, Islamic beams, a fragment of an arrocabe, an Arab funerary stele, several sculptures and four Visigothic belt brooches. The most valuable is a fragment of arrocabe valued at 80,000 euros. All the objects have been transferred to the National Archaeological Museum, the Granada museum and the Prehistory museum in Valencia.