TURKISH police have arrested a museum director and eight others on suspicion of stealing and forging at least two of King Croesus’s treasures.

The 2,500-year-old gold and silver artefacts had been repatriated after a lengthy legal battle with the Metropolitan Museum in New York more than a decade ago. Kazim Akbiyikoglu, director of the museum at Usak in western Turkey, who played a role in the return of the treasures, is suspected of involvement in the theft.

Kayhan Kavas, the Governor of Usak, received an anonymous letter five months ago, alleging that a golden-winged seahorse brooch had been stolen from the collection and replaced with a forgery. The item is from the treasure of Croesus, who lived in the 6th century BC.

An inquiry found that a coin and possibly other pieces had also gone, as well as the intricate 14-gram (½oz) seahorse. The theft is an embarrassment for Turkey, which long campaigned for the return of “the Lydian hoard”. In its efforts to reclaim hundreds of archaeological finds sold or spirited away from its shores — including the British Museum’s Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world — Turkey asserted that it was able to do as good a job of protecting its heritage as anyone.

Atilla Koç, the Culture Minister, said: “You can secure the outside of the museum as much as you want, but no tool has yet been invented to secure the people on the inside.”

The treasures came to Turkey amid much publicity in 1993, when the Metropolitan Museum agreed to return 363 gold and silver coins, jewellery and household items after a six-year legal battle. The small museum in Usak was awarded the right to display the treasures, originally taken from a nearby village in the 1960s.

Omer Erbil, a journalist who first exposed the theft in the Milliyet newspaper, said that Mr Akbiyikoglu was the defendant in at least three court cases on charges from complicity to smuggle artefacts to gambling on museum premises. “He also obstructed past attempts to count and inspect the Croesus treasures,” Mr Erbil said.

Mr Akbiyikoglu, who denies the allegations, said that he had been worried about the museum’s lack of security. “I fought for ten years to get these artefacts here. The villagers told me that all those who originally found the treasure died. They said Croesus’s curse would hit me. They were right.”

WEALTH OF LEGEND

Mr Burns, the tycoon in The Simpsons, lives near Croesus Avenue