IRAQ

Independent: Baghdad museum's greatest treasures 'stolen to order'

Three of the most important antiquities in the history of civilisation were apparently "stolen to order" from the National Museum in Baghdad in the looting that greeted the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

The three objects are a 5,000-year-old vase, an Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) statue base from 2000BC and an Assyrian stone statue from about 800BC. An international alert will now be mounted for these items.

Distraught Iraqi curators said they alone were guarding the shattered fragments of their collections and had resolved to stay because American forces were still unwilling to stand guard outside the National Museum in Baghdad despite international condemnation of the looting.

While there was little left to steal, they stressed the importance of making sure the broken pots, statues and other precious relics of the ancient Iraqi civilisations of Assyria and Mesopotamia – the "cradle of urban civilisation" – lay undisturbed until experts arrived to try to piece them back together.