May 01, 2008	Thursday	Rabi-us-Sani 24, 1429

BERLIN, April 30: German police said on Wednesday they had seized 100 million dollars worth of Mayan, Aztec and Incan artefacts in the latest twist in a real-life saga worthy of “Indiana Jones”.

The artefacts seized in a Munich warehouse last week include over 1,000 masks, gold sculptures and precious stones dating from before Europeans arrived in Latin America, police said. The treasures were impounded following a request from authorities in Costa Rica, but Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama and Peru have also laid claim to them.

A 66-year-old Costa Rican art collector who arranged for the items to be shipped to Germany from Spain says however that they are his lawful property, although he has no export permit, Munich police said in a statement.

The statement added that “at the present time there is no information allowing us to say that these objects are stolen”.

Guatemalan daily Prensa Libre named the collector as former diplomat Leonardo Augustus Patterson and said he was known throughout Central America under the nickname “treasure thief”.

According to the online edition of Spanish daily El Pais, the artefacts left in early March the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela where they had been in storage since being exhibited in 1997.

Spanish authorities were also interested in the items and a judge ruled that 31 items out of 222 claimed by Peru were returned there after deciding that they were of “illegal origin”, El Pais said.

Mexico also requested for 500 objects to be returned, and Guatemala made a similar request, the paper said.

To stop any more objects being seized Patterson -- a man described by the paper as “half way between a collector and a black marketeer” -- decided to move them to Germany, where he lives, the paper said.

The government of the Spanish region of Galicia even considered buying the collection for 18 million euros but decided not to after an expert said there were doubts about their provenance, El Pais said.

Police in Munich said they have not opened the crates containing the artefacts and that they will remain in a secure location for the foreseeable future.

“The prosecutor’s office will decide where the collection will go to,” a police spokesman said. The crates might be in for a long wait.

For the past 10 years a collection of art from Cyprus has been in storage because police have not been able to identify whom it belongs to, the spokesman said.—AFP