A full
inventory of the Egyptian
Museum has found that looters escaped with 18 items during the anti-government unrest, including two gilded
wooden statues of famed boy king Tutankhamun, the
antiquities chief said Sunday. The 18-day uprising that forced out
President Hosni Mubarak engulfed the areas around the
museum, on the edge of Cairo's Tahrir Square. On Jan. 28, as protesters clashed with police early on in the turmoil and burned down the adjacent headquarters of Mubarak's ruling party, a handful of looters climbed a fire escape to the museum roof and lowered themselves on ropes from a glass-paneled ceiling onto the museum's top floor.
Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass said the museum's
database department determined 18 objects were gone. Investigators
searching for those behind the thefts were questioning dozens of people arrested over several days after last month's break-in.
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