Ancient treasures have been stolen in a break-in at Syria's National Museum, with Roman statues and pieces of gold feared to be missing.
The burglary was discovered on Monday, when a door at the Damascus museum was found broken, the thieves having apparently entered the night before. The museum has been closed since then.
The museum had largely escaped damage during Syria's civil war, even as antiquities were looted and destroyed – notably by ISIS – in other parts of the country. It closed last December during the rebel offensive that toppled former president Bashar Al Assad, then reopened in January.
There were conflicting accounts of what was stolen from the museum's classical wing. An official from Syria's antiquities department told the AP that six marble statues were stolen, which a second official said dated back to the Roman era.
Another source described the missing items as "gold ingots", AFP reported. The classical wing contains items from the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods.
Little was known about how the thieves gained entry or escaped. A security source told AFP that several guards and museum workers were detained and questioned then released.
The museum's collections include tens of thousands of items from Syria's long history, ranging from prehistoric tools to Greco-Roman sculpture to pieces of Islamic art. During the war, many pieces stored elsewhere in the country were taken to Damascus for safekeeping, with security improved at the museum with metal gates and surveillance cameras.
The section of the museum where the break-in was reported is "a beautiful and historically rich department with artifacts dating back to the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods”, said Maamoun Abdulkarim, the former head of the antiquities department.
In 2015, ISIS fighters destroyed mausoleums in Syria's Unesco world heritage site of Palmyra, famous for its 2,000-year-old Roman colonnades, other ruins and priceless artefacts.
