Thailand welcomes home trafficked 1,000-year-old statues returned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum

By JERRY HARMER
Associated Press

BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand’s National Museum has welcomed back two ancient statues illegally trafficked from Thailand by a British collector of antiquities that were returned from the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The objects — a tall bronze figure called the Standing Shiva or Golden Boy and a smaller sculpture called Kneeling Female — are thought to be around 1,000 years old. The Metropolitan Museum had announced last year that it would return more than a dozen artifacts to Thailand and Cambodia after they were linked to the late Douglas Latchford, an art dealer and collector accused of running a huge antiquities trafficking network out of Southeast Asia.