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CAIRO: Egyptians reacted with outrage this week after officials said that a 3,000-year-old bracelet that had belonged to an ancient pharaoh was stolen from Cairo’s famed Egyptian Museum and then melted down for gold.
Tourism and Antiquities Minister Sherif Fathy said in televised comments late Saturday that the bracelet was stolen on Sep. 9 while officials at the museum were preparing artifacts for an exhibit in Italy. He blamed “laxity” in implementing procedures at the facility and said that prosecutors were still investigating.
The bracelet, containing a lapis lazuli bead, belonged to Pharaoh Amenemope, who reigned about 3,000 years ago. Authorities said it was taken from a restoration lab at the museum and then funneled through a chain of dealers before being melted down. The minister said the lab didn’t have security cameras.
Four suspects have been arrested and questioned, including a restoration specialist at the museum, the Interior Ministry said.
According to the Interior Ministry, the restoration specialist who was arrested confessed to giving the bracelet to an acquaintance who owns a silver shop in Cairo’s Sayyeda Zainab district. It was later sold to the owner of a gold workshop for the equivalent of about $3,800. It was eventually sold for around $4,000 to a worker at another gold workshop, who melted the bracelet down to make other gold jewelry.
The suspects confessed to their crimes and the money was seized, the ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
The ministry also released security camera video showing a shop owner receiving a bracelet, weighing it, and then paying one of the suspects.
The loss of a treasure that had survived for three millennia was painful to many people in Egypt, where there is great esteem for the nation’s ancient heritage.
Some questioned security measures at the museum and called for tightening these measures around the country’s treasures.
Monica Hanna, a prominent Egyptian archaeologist, called for suspending oversees exhibits “until better control” is implemented to secure the artifacts. Hanna is the dean at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport, and campaigns for the return of Egyptian artifacts exhibited in museums overseas.
Malek Adly, an Egyptian human rights lawyer, called the theft “an alarm bell” for the government and said better security is needed for antiquities in exhibition halls and those in storage.
Amenemope ruled Egypt from Tanis in the Nile Delta during Egypt’s 21st Dynasty. The Tanis royal necropolis was discovered by the French archaeologist Pierre Montet in 1940, according to the Egyptian Museum.
The necropolis’ collection exhibits about 2,500 ancient artifacts, including golden funerary masks, silver coffins and golden jewels. The collection was restored in 2021 in cooperation with the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The theft reminded some of past cultural losses, including the brief disappearance of a Vincent van Gogh’s “Poppy Flowers” — then valued at $50 million — from another Cairo museum in 2010. That painting was recovered within hours.

ANKARA: Turkiye’s main opposition CHP was holding an extraordinary congress to re-elect its leader Sunday as the party fights off a barrage of what critics say are politically-motivated legal challenges.
The move comes as the Republican People’s Party (CHP), seeks to shore up its leadership in the face of a potentially damaging lawsuit seeking to oust Ozgur Ozel as leader.
The lawsuit, which had its second hearing on Monday, aims to overturn the result of CHP’s November 2023 congress which elected Ozel, on grounds of alleged vote rigging.
Taking place in Ankara, the capital, the CHP congress is looking to forge a strategy going forward in a move Ozel has described as “an entirely technical and legal maneuver” to protect the party’s leadership.
At Sunday’s gathering, 911 party members will vote sto re-elect Ozel, who is the only one running, party officials said.
Under his leadership, CHP’s fortunes have improved significantly, with the party winning a huge victory over President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP in the March 2024 local elections.
Since then, the party has been targeted by a wave of arrests and legal cases that peaked in March with the jailing of Istanbul’s popular and powerful mayor Ekrem Imamoglu on corruption allegations that he denies.
The dramatic arrest and jailing of Imamoglu — CHP’s candidate for the 2028 presidential election — sparked an outpouring of protest with Ozel leading huge protests that spread from Istanbul in the worst unrest Turkiye has seen since 2013.
On September 2, a court ousted the leader of CHP’s Istanbul branch, Ozgur Celik, after annulling the outcome of the October 2023, provincial congress that elected him and 195 others.
At the time, political analyst Berk Esen said the move was a “rehearsal” for the bigger case against the overall leadership that was effectively seeking to hobble it as an opposition force.
The next hearing in the CHP case is scheduled for October 24.
CHP’s Istanbul branch will hold its own extraordinary congress on Wednesday to re-elect its leadership.