Islamic State militants 'destroy Palmyra statues'

Six statues are shown being hit with sledgehammers while a crowd looks on.

The jihadist group said the statues had been seized from a smuggler, who was pictured being whipped as a punishment.

Meanwhile, the UN's cultural agency has said antiquities plundered by IS from sites in Iraq and Syria have ended up with collectors in the UK.

Syria's antiquities director Maamoun Abdelkarim said on Thursday the IS group had destroyed a 2,000-year-old statue of a lion from the Palmyra ruins.

Mr Abdelkarim called the destruction of the three-metre (10ft) statue, known as the Lion of al-Lat, "the most serious crime [IS has] committed against Palmyra's heritage."

'Brutal destruction'

Unesco's Director-General Irena Bokova told the BBC that looting was being carried out on an industrial scale and that IS militants were "using the illicit trafficking, the selling of these objects in order to finance extremism and terrorism".

However, Ms Bokova did not provide any evidence to support her allegation that British collectors were buying such artefacts and the view was challenged by an art expert from the art world, says the BBC's Frank Gardner.

Ms Bokova also recently warned against "the brutal and deliberate destruction of heritage on an unprecedented scale" taking place across the Middle East and North Africa.

Some 60% of the Old City of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo has been destroyed in fighting between government forces, rebels and IS fighters, while 20% of Iraq's 10,000 archaeological sites now under the control of the IS group.

The group overran Palmyra at the end of May, sparking fears that it might demolish the Unesco World Heritage site as it has done with ancient sites in Iraq.

Last month, Syrian activists reported that IS fighters had planted landmines and explosives around the ruins, but it was not clear whether they intended to destroy or secure them. Palmyra's museum was also reported to have been closed by the group and guards placed outside.

But a week later, IS militants published photographs of what they said was the destruction of two Islamic shrines near Palmyra, which they described as "manifestations of polytheism".

On Thursday, the group's leadership in Aleppo province posted photos online showing the destruction by militants in the town of Manbij of what it said were statues from Palmyra which had been confiscated from a smuggler.

The images were accompanied by a statement that cited the Prophet Muhammad as saying: "Do not leave any statue without obliterating it or any high grave without levelling it."

In February, IS militants released a video showing the destruction of artefacts that were thousands of years old at the central museum in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

 

(BBC)