California man convicted of smuggling 1,500-year-old mosaic of Hercules
A California man was convicted Wednesday of falsely classifying and illegally importing from Syria a mosaic of Hercules dating back around 1,500 years.
Mohammed Alcharihi, 56, of Palmdale, California, claimed in August 2015 to be importing a set of goods from Turkey.
His manifest claimed that the mosaic was Turkish ceramic tiles worth around $587, and part of a shipment from Turkey with a total value of just $2,199.
However, the goods were traced to war-torn Syria, where Islamist terror groups have been selling off cultural artifacts to fund their activities in that nation’s bloody civil war.
Alcharihi had paid $12,000 for the shipment and later would spend $40,000 restoring the mosaic.
Months before, the U.N. Security Council had adopted a resolution condemning the iconoclastic destruction, the looting and the selling-off of Syrian and Iraqi antiquities by ISIS and fellow Islamist terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra.
The mosaic in question depicts Hercules freeing the Titan god Prometheus from a cliff to which he had been chained as punishment for giving fire to mankind.
An FBI expert later determined the mosaic dated to the Eastern Roman Empire or the Byzantine period, making the mosaic around 1,500 years old.
The expert also said the work was especially consistent with mosaics in the area of the city of Idlib, the capital of a same-named Syrian province under the control of Jabhat al-Nusra in 2015. A successor organization, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, still controls the area today.
After the restoration work, the mosaic was worth around $450,000, the FBI appraiser said.
Alcharihi was convicted of one count of facilitating the entry of falsely classified goods and faces up to two years in prison.
The Justice Department is also seeking to expropriate the illegally-imported artwork.
The mosaic, weighing 2,000 pounds, standing eight feet tall and 15 feet long, has been held at a secure Los Angeles facility since federal agents took it from Alcharihi’s garage in 2016.
