Arrest warrant issued against Lebanese merchant who sold hundreds of looted antiquities in Middle East

CAIRO – 10 August 2022: The New York Criminal Court issued a decision to arrest Georges Lotfi, a prominent Lebanese antiquities collector and antiquities dealer.

For years, Lotfi has been briefing authorities on the movements of looted and smuggled artifacts. He is now accused of illegal dealing in artifacts himself.

Georges Lotfi, 81, is a former pharmaceutical businessman residing in Tripoli (Northern Lebanon). He has been an avid collector and an active dealer of Roman mosaics for decades.

He was accused of smuggling "hundreds of items" from war-torn Lebanon, Syria and Libya, which he kept in his residences near Beirut, Tripoli, Manhattan, Paris and Dubai, or in warehouses in New Jersey, before placing them in the market.

Several of the artifacts were seized by the Art Trafficking Unit (ATU) of the New York Attorney General's Office as well as customs officials in France and Lebanon, according to ARTnews.

Among what was revealed in the affidavit supporting the arrest warrant dated August 3, Lotfi allegedly confessed to being the first bearer of the $12 million Sidon marble head seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017.

Moreover, Lotfi said in an email sent to Special Agent Robert Manson of the Department of Homeland Security on January 22, 2018, that he purchased the bull's head in northern Lebanon in the 1980s, in addition to a trunk of marble.