LOOTED antiquities are being smuggled from Afghanistan by the lorry-load, with huge quantities of objects making their way to Britain, experts said yesterday.

Scotland Yard has just seized several hoards of recently illegally excavated ancient treasures worth millions of pounds. They include sculptures in stone, bronze and terracotta that may have come from temple sites, and that range in date from the third millennium BC to the 5th century AD.

On a visit to London three weeks ago, a French expert was shown an important Bronze Age bowl that had come to Britain after being stolen in Kabul. A private collector had bought it in good faith.

Hundreds of other ancient pieces in ivory, gold and silver have been offered at Pakistani bazaars before heading for private collections worldwide.

Despite Western claims of near normality in Afghanistan, treasures are being dug up illegally from thousands of archaeological sites around the country before being smuggled across the border into Pakistan without any checks.

Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) is so alarmed that it is appealing to governments to fund a “heritage army” to guard some of the sites. They argue that such an army stopped the looting in Cambodia.

Afghanistan’s cultural heritage was considered one of the richest in Asia because it was the cradle of Greco-Bactrian art. It was there that the Asian art merged with Grecian art to give the Buddha a human form. Excavations had proved rich in antiquities, particularly gold.

The Taleban regime took sledgehammers to antiquities and blew up the famous Bamiyan Buddhas as idolatrous.

Unesco was even prompted unofficially to suggest that Westerners leaving the country should bring out whatever they could, even without export permission, as the only way to save doomed treasures. A Unesco-approved museum in Switzerland was set up as a holding centre for Afghan treasures that would be returned as soon as the country was stable.

But 18 months since the fall of the Taleban, the illicit excavations and the smuggling continue to destroy the country’s archaeological heritage.

Christian Manhart, of Unesco’s cultural heritage division, said: “What is so difficult is that objects that come out now are from illicit excavations. No one knows where they come from. They just appear on the art market. A dealer comes along and says, ‘it’s from an old collection from Switzerland and has been there for 50 years’. It is very difficult to prove that the objects came recently from Afghanistan.” He said that London was one of the smugglers’ main outlets. “Unesco is extremely alarmed about this. It’s coming out by the lorryload. Afghanistan has no customs officers, almost no controls. When I went through customs, I was told, ‘either give me $1 or I search your suitcase’. That’s not a big amount, so people get away with it.”

The seized material represents a tiny percentage of what is coming out, hidden in containers of other goods such as furniture or carpets.

Robert Knox, the British Museum’s Keeper of the Department of Asia, is working closely with Unesco and Scotland Yard. He said: “It’s a very serious matter. So much is coming out. It’s a free-for-all. Their country is being ravaged. There’s no security left. The poor Afghans are unable to protect what they have. If there were a functioning police force, there would be some protection.”

Shipments of material that he has been shown include “enormously high-quality” pieces that are being seen for the first time in centuries since being dug up. Mr Knox said this made their detective work all the more difficult: “You can’t say, ‘that’s come from that shelf’ (in a museum). It’s just come out of a site somewhere.”

In the bazaar at Peshawar, experts have spotted coins depicting kings that are not even known to historians. Removed from their original site, the chances of learning more about them have been lost.

William Webber, specialist in antiquities for The Art Loss Register, which carries some of the missing Afghan treasures on its computerised database of stolen works, said that the problem was exacerbated by forgers: “There’s a lot of faking as well. Local dealers are jumping on the bandwagon. It all makes its way here.”

Experts from all over the world are responding to the urgency of the problem by taking part in an international conference, to be staged by Unesco later this month. Specialists from Afghanistan will attend, along with the country’s Culture Minister, Makhdoum Raheen. Most of the treasures are from illicit digs, but ivories, Greco-Buddhist items of the 1st and 2nd century AD and a collection of 30,000 coins were once in the Kabul Museum.

Osmund Bopearachchi, a French numismatic specialist, is among scholars determined to restore some of the treasures to Afghanistan. He was shown the Bronze Age bowl three weeks ago. “It is a very important piece,” he said. “In the midst of the continuing human suffering in Afghanistan, it is impossible to suppress a sense of pain, despair and above all anger at the destruction of the cultural heritage of a land that was one of the great meeting points between East and West, the literal and figurative crossroads of Central Asia.”

An agreement is now being finalised between the archaeological museum at Lattes, near Montpelier, and Unesco to exhibit the bowl until it can be returned to Kabul.

Asked how the illegal trade could be stopped, Mr Manhart said: “The problem is particularly difficult because there is still a long way to go before we have a stable political situation in Afghanistan. It is difficult to go to some of these sites.”

He added: “Maybe the art market should be more supervised, with more means given to Scotland Yard so that more police can go to auctioneers and dealers to verify where objects have come from.”

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