Egypt’s Minister of Culture Faruq Hosni has formed several committees to conduct an evaluation and inventory of all antiquities and masterpieces in museums across the country in the wake of the theft of a priceless Vincent Van Gogh painting, his office said yesterday.
“All art and national museums will do a comprehensive assessment to gather all data about their collections,” the ministry said in a statement, without elaborating further about the inventory.
Earlier this week, the ministry launched plans to set up a security control room to monitor all museums after thieves last week made off in broad daylight with a valuable painting from Cairo’s Mahmoud Khalil Museum, on the west bank of the Nile.
A single security guard usually worked in the museum and most of its cameras were out of order since 2006, the state news agency Mena reported yesterday.
A prosecution investigation into the theft of Van Gogh’s ‘Poppy Flowers’ found the museum had cut the number of guards from 30 to nine, and “most days the number was reduced so that there was only one guard in the museum,” Mena reported.