Chilean authorities returned 117 fossils relationship again 400 million years to Morocco in a repatriation ceremony on the Nationwide Library of Chile in Santiago on Monday. The artifacts had been seized from smugglers by Chilean customs officers.
In the course of the handover ceremony, Nelida Pozo Kudo, director of the Chilean Nationwide Heritage Service, praised the cooperation between Morocco and Chile.
“Chilean customs’ seizure of those Moroccan-origin fossils and their return to the dominion is a transparent instance of each international locations’ dedication to combating illicit entry to cultural property in accordance with worldwide regulation,” mentioned Pozo Kudo.
“Smuggling of antiquities and fossils relationship again hundreds of thousands of years could also be worse than drug trafficking,” added Kenza El Ghali, Morocco’s ambassador to Chile. The representatives of the international locations closed the ceremony by signing a cultural collaboration settlement.
Morocco is among the many international locations to lately renew efforts to reclaim looted and trafficked cultural property. In 2021, France handed over some 25,000 archaeological objects. These objects had been confiscated by French authorities by way of a sequence of raids on suspected antiquities traffickers carried out over greater than a decade.