Word: karachi
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...When Karachi police discovered a gold-bedecked mummy believed to be at least 2,600 years old in the possession of a tribal chief in southwestern Pakistan last October, it had all the signs of a blockbuster find. Never before had a mummy been unearthed in Pakistan. Was she an Egyptian princess looted from an ancient tomb thousands of years ago and adorned with ornaments in ancient Mesopotamia or Persia? Were these the remains of an ancient Persian royal...
...October, Karachi police received reports that a mummy was being offered for sale to "big foreigners," including an unidentified ambassador. A 50-minute amateur video of the mummy, with a 1990 date stamp, featured close-ups of its gold crown and breastplate. The asking price: $10 million. The possession of antiquities older than 50 years is a crime in Pakistan, as is their forgery; Karachi's deputy superintendent of police, Muhammad Farooq Awan, arrested the video's distributor, who led police to Quetta, Baluchistan's rugged provincial capital. There, Awan and his team raided the home of Wali Muhammad Reeki...
...coffin, it was placed in what initially appeared to be a stone sarcophagus (it turned out to be made of grains of opaque white glass). Astounded by the find, police loaded the mummy into the van and jounced along dusty back roads on a 24-hour ride home to Karachi...
...stake their claims. Tehran, believing it was ancient Persian royalty who had married an Egyptian, said it would take steps to get it back. Afghanistan's Taliban regime also claimed ownership for reasons that are unclear. But in January when Tehran finally sent a team of experts to Karachi, they left in disgust, terming the mummy a "phony without any cultural value...
...never know the identity of the victim?believed to have been no more than 21 years old when she died?or of her enterprising murderer (or team of killers) who went to enormous trouble to duplicate mummification techniques and the ancient cuneiform writing. Saleem ul Haq, director of Karachi's archaeology department, is convinced the perpetrator of the fraud is "definitely someone who has links to archaeology." But as good as his attention to detail may have been, it wasn't good enough. The first clue: South Asia's ancient civilizations had no tradition of mummification. Also, at Karachi...