August 18
CHINA:
China curator gets death penalty for stealing relics
The head of a relics protection department at a former Chinese imperial
palace has been sentenced to death for stealing the artefacts he was meant
to protect, the Xinhua news agency said yesterday.
Li Haitao was found guilty of stealing 259 relics from the Eight Outer
Temples, part of the World Heritage Chengde Mountain Resort site in
central Hebei Province, and replacing them with fakes.
The crimes took place between 1992 and 2002 when Li was head of the
Cultural Relics Protection Department.
"Li pocketed more than 3.2 million yuan ($NZ586,100) and $US72,000 by
selling 152 pieces of cultural relics he had stolen," Xinhua said.
Police had seized more than 100 relics from his private collection, it
said.
The Intermediate People's Court of Chengde city also sentenced four of
Li's accomplices to jail terms from between 2 and 5 years and fined them
between 10,000 yuan and 100,000 yuan, it said.
The sprawling, 300-year-old resort, a major tourist destination 150km
northeast of Beijing, served as the temporary imperial palace of the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911) emperors Kangxi and Qianlong.
It was listed by Unesco as a World Heritage site in 1994, Xinhua said.
(source: Stuff.co.nz)
