By Mona El-Nahhas FOUR years after being impounded at Heathrow Airport, a collection of 619 Ancient Egyptian artefacts has come back to its homeland, reports Nevine El-Aref. Last Monday, dozens of Egyptian and foreign journalists and photographers joined top antiquities officials in the Egyptian Museum's room number 39 to catch a glimpse of the repatriated treasures. "It is the first time that Egypt has recovered such an overwhelming number of antiquities at once," Culture Minister Farouk Hosni told reporters. He said the cache's return reflects the mutual cooperation between Britain and Egypt. Although no judicial or legal agreement between the two nations stipulated the move, strong diplomatic ties and a commitment to return illegally smuggled antiquities to their homeland were behind the effort. Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) Secretary-General Zahi Hawass said British customs impounded four large wooden boxes containing a huge number of artefacts at Heathrow Airport in April 2000. Scotland Yard's subsequent investigations revealed that the shipment belonged to Mamdouh Michael, an Egyptian residing in Zurich, who claimed that he had inherited the 619 artefacts from his father in 1956. Because Michael did not provide the documents that proved his ownership, the artefacts had to be examined by a British Museum expert to check their authenticity. In June 2002, an Egyptian antiquities committee also examined them, and concluded that the objects were smuggled out of Cairo in 1997. Hawass said that a joint effort by the SCA and Egyptian State Security subsequently found that the artefacts had been officially registered in SCA documents. State Security's Hisham Abdel- Meguid said that the objects would now be used as evidence in a major antiquities smuggling case that is currently in court. Hawass told reporters that negotiations between Egypt and other concerned foreign authorities are currently underway to return a head of Amenhotep III from London, as well as five reliefs from Athens, and nine stela from the US. Ordeal over THE 4800 Egyptian pilgrims who were left stranded for several days at the Nuweiba port on Egypt's Red Sea coast finally had their dilemma resolved on Sunday, after the Tourism Ministry sent two ships to transport them to the Jordanian port of Aqaba. The pilgrims' ordeal began when officials at Port Tawfiq (in Port Said) discovered that the ships that were supposed to take the pilgrims to Aqaba were not technically fit to do so. The pilgrims were then forced to take buses to Nuweiba port instead, where they had been stuck since 17 October. Last Friday, they held a demonstration to protest the appalling living conditions they had been forced to endure. The port at Nuweiba, after all, is only designed for transit purposes, and many of the pilgrims, including women and children, had been sleeping in open-air shelters. The tour company was found to have been negligent in several respects. Not only had they provided unfit ships, they had not arranged for transportation between Aqaba and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian authorities resolved the issue by sending 100 buses to transport the pilgrims from Aqaba to Mecca. During a ministerial meeting last week, President Hosni Mubarak called for severe penalties to be imposed on tour companies that do not fulfil their contracts. These companies' licences may be revoked in certain cases, Mubarak warned. Official imprisoned A CAIRO Criminal Court sentenced Ahmed Abdel-Fattah, the legal adviser to former Agriculture Minister Youssef Wali, to 15 years jail time after finding him guilty on several counts. Abdel-Fattah was sentenced to 10 years and fined a sum of LE1000 for bribery. He received an additional five years in prison and a fine estimated at LE5,598,292 for misusing his post. The amount is equivalent to the kickback he received from a corrupt deal gone wrong. Abdel-Fattah's wife Kariman Kamel was obliged to repay LE2,644,000, and his sister-in-law Fatemah Hamed LE822,000; Abdel-Fattah had deposited those amounts in their names. The court said that although Abdel- Fattah left his post in November 2002, he still had powers at the ministry when the crime was committed. The court thus decided that Wali's claim about Abdel-Fattah no longer having any capacity at the ministry was inaccurate. Abdel-Fattah was arrested in February while receiving an LE1 million bribe from businessman Ahmed Saad in return for helping him obtain a 2000 feddan plot of land on the Cairo- Alexandria desert highway. Saad told officials at the Administrative Control Agency that he had been blackmailed by Abdel-Fattah, who was demanding an additional LE1 million to complete the paperwork. Officials advised Saad to keep the deal going. Subsequent phone calls between the two were recorded and Abdel-Fattah was arrested red-handed.
