Looted treasures 'still in Iraq'

Looters attacked Iraq's national museum after the fall of Baghdad

Few looted art treasures are being smuggled out of Iraq, but more investigations are needed into the problem, an Interpol expert says.

Jean-Pierre Jouanny said traffic of stolen art out of Iraq was thought to be "quite limited at the moment".

But the police body was seeking more details about at least 400 items seized at the Jordan-Iraq border, he said.

About 10,000 artefacts are still missing after being stolen from Iraq's national museum.

Mr Jouanny said the fact it was hard for non-accredited outsiders to get access the US-occupied country meant it was difficult for smugglers to set up networks.

Interpol publishes a twice-yearly poster of the world's top six missing artworks, and the most recent one is devoted to treasures that went missing during the Iraq conflict.

"These are items that would be very hard to get out and which are very well known to major dealers and experts internationally, so they're practically impossible to sell," Mr Jouanny said.

The first item, a 5,000-year-old sculpted head known as the Sumerian Mona Lisa, was returned to the Baghdad Museum last week after US military police dug it up from a shallow grave following a tip-off.

Hunt 'will take years'

Looters attacked the national museum in the days following the fall of Saddam Hussein in April.

More than 3,000 artefacts from the museum have been recovered after being looted.

But the team which has been working to catalogue the missing items for five months says it will take years to track them down.

More than 1,700 items were returned in an amnesty with 900 seized in raids and at checkpoints, airports and borders.

Another 750 were recovered from four different countries.

Among the stolen items were a statue from 2300 BC and Roman heads of Poseidon, Apollo, Nike and Eros.