Stolen artifacts from Palmyra and Yemen seized in Geneva

Relics date back to third and fourth centuries

Customs inspectors became suspicious in 2013 (AP)

Artefacts looted from Syria’s ancient Semitic city of Palmyra have been seized by Swiss authorities after they were discovered in Geneva’s secretive free ports — warehouses often used to store expensive objects with few questions asked.

Relics from war-torn Yemen and Libya were also confiscated from the storage lockers, which are often placed near airports and allow people to keep items tax-free.

The relics date back to the third and fourth centuries and include a head of Aphrodite.

Geneva's public prosecutor said in a statement most of the items arrived in Switzerland after travelling through Qatar and were taken by looters, who left them at the ports between 2009 and 2010.

Suspicions were raised in April 2013 during a customs inspection, prosecutors added, and criminal proceedings began in February.

Three of the artefacts came from Palmyra, an ancient city ravaged by Isis after it seized control in mid-2015.

Videos of the group vandalising the Unesco site – which contains relics dating back to the neolithic period – elicited shock and horror around the world when they were circulated on social media.

Another five of the confiscated objects were from Yemen, AFP reported.

The Aphrodite relic was from Libya and characterised “the Hellenisation of north Africa” the statement said, adding that the Geneva Museum of Art and History will now put the relics on public display before returning them to their country of origin.

On Saturday, France and the United Arab Emirates launched a $100 million fund to protect heritage sites threatened by conflict.

The money will be used to create “safe havens” for endangered artifacts and to transport and restore monuments damaged by war, according to UAE state news agency WAM.

In October French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said more needed to be done to tackle the role of free ports in helping fund terrorism.

“We have to fight the trade in works of art as part of the fight against terrorist financing,” he said, adding: “there is a weak link [in fighting terrorist funding], which is the existence of free ports”.