Some Museum Looting Done For Safe Keeping

It appears that at least a small portion of the thousands of objects that disappeared were "looted" for safekeeping.

Muslim clerics have announced over mosque loudspeakers that anyone with looted items should return them to museum curators, no questions asked. U.S. reconstruction officials said they plan to air similar messages on Iraqi radio stations starting tonight.

U.S. forces have drawn worldwide criticism for failing to quickly seal off the museum as they seized Baghdad, allowing the plunder of one of the world's greatest collections of artifacts from Mesopotamia and other ancient civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates valley.

U.S. forces have drawn worldwide criticism for failing to quickly seal off the museum as they seized Baghdad, allowing the plunder of one of the world's greatest collections of artifacts from Mesopotamia and other ancient civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates valley.

Monte Reel of Washington Post relates an eye-witness account of one Iraqi 's heroics

Namir Ibrahim Jamil, a 33-year-old Iraqi pianist said that 11 days ago he watched in horror as looters ransacked the museum, hauling away as much of Iraq's tangible legacy as they could carry. He said he decided to do the same -- not to seek a fortune on the black market, but to hide the antiquities in his house until it was safe to return them.

As he recounts it, on April 12 he drove to the city of Karbala to pick up relatives who had fled Baghdad before the war. When he returned to the capital, U.S. military roadblocks forced him to take an alternate route, past the museum. There he saw the looting and decided to act, he said. His brother and a brother-in-law joined with him in entering the opened gates of the museum, where they grabbed everything they could.

For Jamil, a longtime student of the piano, culture had generally meant the compositions of Bach and Beethoven, but he said he remembered lessons in Iraqi history from his school days. He recognized the statue of Assyrian King Shalmaneser III, which lay in several pieces on the floor. He collected all the fragments, including slivers that had been chipped away from a blow to the statue's midsection.

"It is our history, our heritage, our civilization," Jamil said today. "So I knew it was a very valuable thing."

They filled the van and drove it home, then returned for another load. At his home, he gathered foam and plastic and wrapped the art objects. The next day, he contacted Donny George, director general of research and study for the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, to tell him what he had.

Today George was at the museum and said he had told Jamil to keep the things until the museum was secure."I am so happy," George said, patting his heart with affection for Jamil.

George embraced him by the door of his van; Jamil sobbed in his arms.

Other people carried the returned items through the door and under the domed ceiling of the museum's lobby, which -- like almost every other government building in Iraq -- is decorated with a painting of the now deposed president, Saddam Hussein.

Just minutes after Jamil arrived with his second van load, a U.S. Army truck pulled up at the museum carrying about 80 Iraqi paintings, the oldest of them dating to the 19th century. Officers with the 308th Civil Affairs Brigade said they recovered the paintings from a sewage-flooded vault in a heavily damaged building about a quarter-mile from the museum.

Some of the paintings had frames still dripping with water, some had jagged rips in the canvas. "They had these paintings just sitting in the water," said Col. Vincent Foulk, of Urbana, Ohio. "In some cases, you could see paint literally dripping off."

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