The Guardian Confirms Vandalising Assaraya Alhamra Museum:

In an article titled: "In Tripoli's museum of antiquity only Gaddafi is lost in revolution", the guardian.co.uk confirms the vandalising of the National Museum in Tripoli:

"At 11.30pm on 20 August 2011, as rebels launched their first attack on the Libyan capital, 20 armed men entered the museum . . . the rebels spotted the colonel's vintage cars and, as elsewhere, wreaked their revenge. The windows of the sky blue Beetle were smashed; thousands of shards of glass now lie on the floor . . . The headlamps are also damaged but the period gearstick, glovebox, running boards, speedometer and steering wheel remain intact. Staff at the museum . . . had no choice but to let the rebels enter. Mustafa Turjman, head of research at the national department of archaeology, said: "It was a revolution – you can't resist . . . But the vandalism was swiftly quelled by a plea . . . Although there is graffiti in places and one broken window, just a cloak and a rifle, used in the Libyan resistance against Italian occupation, were stolen."

Read the full report at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/sep/11/tripoli-museum-antiquity-shattered-gaddafi-image

Short link for the report:
http://gu.com/p/3xz76

Looting of Libya's Archaeological Artifacts & Assaraya Museum: is it true?

Assaraya Alhamra  Museum (al-Jamahiriya National Museum)

Last week a number of Internet sites and blogs circulated the claims in that massive looting was underway in Libya; Leptis Magna was affected by the war; and that prehistoric art sites were vandalised during the recent events in Libya. The claims originally came from the Russian Nikolai Sologubovsky, apparently a deputy head of a Russian committee of solidarity with the people of Libya and Syria, who told Russian television, without providing any evidence, that the National Museum in Tripoli has been looted and antiquities were being shipped out by sea to Europe.

Vandalising prehistoric art in Libya is not new, as Temehu.com covered at: http://www.temehu.com/vandalised-rockart.htm, and there is no reason to suppose it will not happen again or it did not happen recently; and if it did then there is nothing new about it. Also we have no evidence regarding the looting of Assaraya Alhamra Museum, but we are very much interested to hear from those who have any evidence to share.

According to http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/09/claims-of-mass-libyan-looting.html (Claims of Mass Libyan Looting Rejected by Archaeologists): "The antiquities in the major sites are unscathed," says Hafed Walda, an archaeologist at King's College London, who has been in frequent contact with his Libyan colleagues during the recent arrival of rebels in the capital city last week. "But a few sites in the interior sustained minor damage and are in need of assessments."