Search widens for Russia's missing Hermitage items

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Moscow (dpa) - Artefacts worth 5 million US dollars that vanished from the Hermitage State Museum in St Petersburg will be added to an international list of wanted items, Russian officials said Wednesday as more law-enforcement agencies joined the hunt for the thieves.

However, tracing the 221 pieces would be hard even with foreign help owing to a lack of detailed information on about half of them and very few available photographs, a police spokesman said.

Russian auction houses were to be monitored for signs of the jewellery, enamelled items, church icons and other rarities that were found to be missing from the world famous museum's repositories during a recent inventory check.

Meanwhile, the interior ministry sent a task force of detectives specialising in theft of antiquities to the northern city, and the FSB domestic intelligence service also joined the fray.

Lapse security and incomplete cataloguing left these and other treasures vulnerable to theft over a period of decades, investigators said after the disappearance was made public earlier this week.

A full inventory will now be carried out at the Hermitage, which has around three million objects in its vaults and on display.

The museum's director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, still bore out hope that the pieces would surface among the stored works. But other authorities said the items may already be moving on the black market and would be detected in time.

"It is in the nature of these valuable art pieces that sooner or later they will appear on the art market. We will find them, either on the Russian collectors' scene or abroad," said Boris Boyarskov, head of the federal agency that protects the country's cultural heritage.

More than 15,000 stolen artefacts are currently being sought by police in Russia, which together with Italy and the Czech Republic leads in numbers of art thefts, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.

Last year 200 objects worth 50 million rubles (1.8 million dollars) were recovered, according to official figures.