Antiquities Expert Charged With Trafficking in Cambodian Artifacts

THE NEW YORK TIMES 
By Julia Jacobs and Tom Mashberg

A 10th-century sandstone statue, known as the Duryodhana, that was returned to Cambodia. U.S. Attorney's Office, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Investigators have charged Douglas A. J. Latchford, a leading expert on Khmer antiquities, with smuggling looted Cambodian relics and helping to sell them on the international art market by concealing their tainted histories with falsified documentation. In a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday, Mr. Latchford, 88, was accused of having served for decades as a “conduit” for Cambodian antiquities that had been excavated illegally from ancient jungle temples during unrest in the country starting in the mid-1960s, with the beginnings of the Cambodian civil war. [More]