‘Cave Of The Skulls’ Looters Apprehended In Israel — But Leave Behind Irreparable Damage

Hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts have been collected from the caverns in the Judean Desert, some of them simple trinkets of day-to-day life, and others major discoveries for the Jewish and Christian faiths. Some of those prominent findings came from The Cave of Skulls, a specific cave in the area that has most notably yielded the Dead Sea Scrolls. The site has such a reputation for enshrining pieces of ancient history that it is confronting a very modern problems: looters, specifically those who try to move in on ancient artifacts with no training in how to extract them and properly preserve the conditions in which they were found.

Six Palestinian men trying to make such a steal from the Cave of the Skulls were apprehended before they could make off with the ancient Roman lice comb that they found. Hatem bin Abdel-Qader al-Matur, 38, Ghassar bin Ibrahim al-Matur, 43, Nuaf bin Halil al-Matur, 39, Osama bin Issa al-Matur, 36, Wael bin Issa al-Matur, 35, and Majdi bin Issa al-Matur have all been taken into custody on charges of illegal excavation and unsanctioned movement through Israeli territory, reported NPR.

Police were able to catch the men because of previous observation activities of the Cave of the Skulls of the robbery of Dead Sea Scrolls from the same area. Authorities arrested the men as they left the cave, with what they thought was their booty. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop all of the damage they did to the Cave of the Skulls as a historical site, even if Israel is making gains on protecting their national heritage, Guy Fitoussi, the director of the Antiquities Authority’s Southern Region Prevention Unit, told NPR.

“These guys did really amazing stuff. I mean, bad amazing… Israel didn’t dig enough in the desert since the big digs of the 1950s and ’60s, [there was] a black whole for law enforcement…But for us is it’s good because besides the prison thing, we now know these people. We have lots of information now. It’s making this war easier.”

Amir Ganor, director of the IAA’s Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery, told The Times of Israel said that keeping the treasures safe is no easy task. Looters can make outrageous sums of money selling the artifacts on the black market, and the terrain makes them difficult to spot while they are in the act.

“These finds are sold for large sums of money in the antiquities markets in Israel and around the world. Over the years many of the plundered finds reached the antiquities markets in Israel and abroad, but it has been decades since perpetrators were caught red-handed. This is mainly due to the difficulty in detecting and catching them on the wild desert cliffs.”

[Image via Flickr and Israeli Antiquities Authority]