New York Returns 657 Trafficked Antiquities to India in Major Repatriation
A bronze deity, a monumental Buddha, and a long trail of forged ownership records were all part of the same case. On April 28, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. announced that 657 trafficked antiquities had been returned to India, a repatriation valued at nearly $14 million and carried out with the help of the D.A.’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and Homeland Security investigations.
The handover took place in New York and included representatives from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Consulate General of India. Bragg said the scale of the trafficking networks targeting India’s cultural heritage remains vast, adding that more work is still needed to return stolen artifacts.
Among the most significant objects is a bronze figure of Avalokiteshvara, valued at $2 million. The work was one of a group of 7th- and 8th-century bronzes discovered in 1939 at the Sirpur archaeological site in India. It later entered the collection of the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum in Raipur, was stolen by 1982, and eventually surfaced in a private New York collection before being seized by the D.A.’s office in 2025.
Also repatriated was a red sandstone standing Buddha from northern India, valued at $7.5 million. Investigators traced the statue to Subhash Kapoor, the former Manhattan-based dealer convicted in India in 2022 for running a decades-long antiquities trafficking operation and now awaiting extradition to the United States. The Antiquities Trafficking Unit recovered the work from one of Kapoor’s New York storage units.
A sandstone sculpture of a dancing Ganesha was also returned. The piece had been looted by convicted trafficker Vaman Ghiya and shipped to Doris Wiener, a New York gallery owner. After Wiener’s death, her daughter Nancy, later convicted by the D.A.’s office of antiquities trafficking, created a false provenance for the sculpture and sold it through Christie’s in 2012. The buyer later surrendered it to investigators.
The case reflects the breadth of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit’s work over the past decade. Since obtaining an arrest warrant for Kapoor in 2012 and securing convictions of five co-conspirators in 2019, the unit has recovered more than 6,200 cultural treasures worth more than $485 million. More than 5,900 of those objects have been returned to 36 countries, underscoring how persistent art-crime investigations can slowly unwind illicit networks that span continents.
