London:
The British Museum, one of London’s premier tourist attractions with thousands of precious artefacts on display, has sacked a staffer pending legal action after several treasures from a storeroom were found to have been stolen.
The famous public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture, which also has several ancient Indian artefacts on display including a gallery devoted to ‘India: Amravati’ sculptures, said on Wednesday it has launched an independent review of security after items from the collection were found to be missing, stolen or damaged earlier this year.
The matter is also under investigation by the Economic Crime Command of the Metropolitan Police.
We called in the police, imposed emergency measures to increase security, set up an independent review into what happened and lessons to learn, and used all the disciplinary powers available to us to deal with the individual we believe to be responsible,” said George Osborne, Chair of the British Museum.
The former UK chancellor of the exchequer laid out the museum’s priority as threefold: to recover the stolen items; to find out what could have been done to stop this; and to do “whatever it takes”, with investment in security and collection records, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
