AMERICAN investigators in Iraq have found safely locked in vaults almost 40,000 manuscripts and 700 artefacts previously believed to have been looted from the National Museum in Baghdad.

The items include a clay pot from 5000 BC, an inscribed cornerstone from King Nebuchadnezzar’s 7th-century BC Babylon palace and hundreds of pieces of ancient jewellery, pottery and sarcophaguses.

US officials said that many items originally thought to have been looted were placed in hidden vaults, discovered inside the museum this week, for protection before the war began. Other items were returned once agents talked of amnesty and potential rewards.

The investigators, made up of US customs agents working with coalition troops, refused to give a detailed inventory of the recovered items.

They would not say if the artefacts included any of the 38 high-value items that had been confirmed missing by the museum’s curators.

More than 39,400 ancient manuscripts have been found, but officials conceded that “certain high-value pieces” had been stolen from the vaults.

John Ashcroft, the US Attorney-General, suggested at a conference of Interpol this week that the looters included criminals who knew what they were looking for and had stolen items to order.

Times Recommends

• Would you live on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall?
• Wish you were here, says Iraq tourist board
• Russian policeman’s corruption plea to Putin