Egypt's general prosecutor has blocked nine Culture Ministry officials from travel as part of an inquiry into the theft of a Van Gogh painting worth an estimated $55 million, a state-owned newspaper said on Monday.
The painting, known as "Poppy Flower" according to an Arabic statement, was stolen on Saturday from Cairo’s Mahmoud Khalil Museum, home to one of the Middle East’s finest
collections of 19th- and 20th-century art.Fine arts specialist Ezz el-Din Naguib, speaking in a program on state television, said the painting had also been stolen in the late 1970s but was recovered 10 years later.
An early investigation at the museum showed "flagrant shortcomings" in security with only 7 of 43 security cameras functioning properly, the state daily al-Ahram reported, without giving further details.
On Saturday, Egypt’s minister of culture, Farouk Hosni, said that police had confiscated the painting from an Italian couple at Cairo airport hours after it was stolen.
But Hosni later backtracked, saying his announcement was based on "false and incorrect" information. He
He said authorities were still searching for the missing painting.
It was not clear what caused the confusion over the artwork’s fate.
This is the second time this painting by the Dutch-born postimpressionist has been stolen from the Khalil museum. Thieves first made off with the canvas in 1978, before authorities recovered it two years later at an undisclosed location in Kuwait. Officials have never fully revealed the details of that theft.
The 12-inch-by-12-inch (30-centimer-by-30-centimeter) canvas, believed to have been painted in 1887, resembles a flower scene by the French artist Adolphe Monticelli, whose work deeply affected van Gogh. The Monticelli painting also is part of the Khalil collection.
Mahmoud Khalil Museum houses works assembled by Mohammed Mahmoud Khalil, a politician who died in 1953, including paintings by Gauguin, Monet, Manet and Renoir, as well as the Dutch post-Impressionist master Van Gogh.