Before meeting King Charles, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he would encourage the visitng British monarch to return the historic Kohinoor diamond to India.
New York: The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has returned 657 antiquities, collectively valued at nearly $14 million, to India following multiple investigations into international trafficking networks. District Attorney Alvin L Bragg Jr announced the restitution during a ceremony attended by Consul Rajlakshmi Kadam from the Consulate General of India in New York.
Authorities recovered the artifacts through ongoing probes into criminal networks linked to alleged trafficker Subhash Kapoor and convicted trafficker Nancy Wiener. Officials highlighted the scale of cultural theft targeting India, noting that more than 600 items were returned in this single operation.
“The scale of the trafficking networks that targeted cultural heritage in India is massive,” Bragg said, adding that further efforts are required to return stolen artifacts.
Consul General Binaya Pradhan acknowledged the role of US agencies, including the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Department of Homeland Security, in recovering culturally significant objects.
Among the returned pieces is a bronze figure of Avalokiteshvara, valued at $2 million. The sculpture, originally housed in the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum in Raipur, was stolen and smuggled into the United States by 1982 before being seized from a private New York collection in 2025.
Another major recovery includes a red sandstone Buddha statue worth $7.5 million. Smugglers transported the damaged statue into New York through Kapoor’s network, where authorities later seized it from a storage unit.
Officials also returned a sandstone statue of a dancing Ganesha, looted from a temple in Madhya Pradesh in 2000. Traffickers sold the piece through false provenance documents and auctioned it at Christie’s New York in 2012. A private collector later surrendered the artefact earlier this year.
Did Mamdani ask King Charles to return Kohinoor?
New York: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he would have told visiting UK King Charles to return the Kohinoor diamond, which has come to be a symbol of British loot of India. Before he was to meet the monarch (local time) at a ceremony to honor the 9/11 victims, he said, “If I were to speak to the King separately from that, I’d probably encourage him to return the Kohinoor diamond”. Later, the Democratic Socialist met Charles in a crowded setting at the memorial in a crush of VIPs. Videos of their brief encounter showed Charles smiling as they spoke very briefly. But it was not known what they spoke about, and Charles’ demeanor did not betray any discomfort or that a serious matter was raised. Charles was on a four-day visit to the United States as the nation prepared to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its Independence gained when it threw out the colonial oppressors of his long-ago predecessor, George III, in a bloody revolution. The 106-carat Kohinoor is now set on the crown worn by Charles’ grandmother and is at the Tower of London. One of the world’s largest diamonds, it was seized in 1949 by the East India Company from 11-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh after the Second Anglo-Sikh War. |
