DHAKA: Bangladesh security forces said on Wednesday they have detained an antique shop owner in connection with a stolen Nobel medal for literature awarded in 1913 to Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore.
Abdul Hossain was arrested late on Tuesday in the capital on a tip that he had the medal stolen in 2004 from the Visva Bharati university museum in India’s West Bengal state, Bangladesh’s elite Rapid Action Battalion said.
The medal has not been found. Hossain, 65, was being questioned, the battalion said.
Tagore, an icon of India’s independence struggle who wrote the country’s national anthem, won the Nobel Prize while India was under British colonial rule.
He died in 1941, before the end of British rule and the partition of India.
Tagore wrote almost all of his poems, fiction and non-fiction in Bengali, the mother tongue of nearly 230 million people in Bangladesh and West Bengal, and is revered in both areas.
Along with the Nobel medal, Indian police said Tagore’s watch, other gold medals, rare items and paintings were also stolen from the museum, which the poet founded in 1901.
In May 2005, Sweden presented India with two replicas of the Nobel medal awarded to Tagore that are housed at the university under tight security.—AFP
