Doctor turned smuggler gets 6 months for bringing hundreds of Egyptian artifacts to US

John Annese, New York Daily News on Aug 28, 2025

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NEW YORK — An Egyptian doctor who smuggled hundreds of artifacts excavated from graves and dig sites in his nation into the U.S. for profit will spend six months in federal prison, a Brooklyn judge ruled Wednesday.

Ashraf Omar Eldarir, 52, a naturalized U.S. citizen living in Brooklyn, was caught entering JFK Airport on Jan. 22, 2020 with three suitcases filled with 590 undeclared cultural items. The items were protected by bubble and foam wrapping, and some were so freshly excavated that loose sand and dirt tumbled out.

It turned out he’d been arranging to obtain and smuggle artifacts into the U.S. for years, the feds say, telling auction houses a convenient lie that they came from his grandfather’s collection, which dated back to 1948 — decades before a 1970 UNESCO treaty prohibited the unauthorized importing of cultural items.

The JFK stash, described as the largest seizure of its type, included gold amulets from a funerary set, a relief with the cartouche of a Ptolemaic king that was originally part of a royal building or temple, and wooden tomb model figures with linen garments dating to approximately 1900 BCE. They were appraised at a total $82,000.

“This is not a case of Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread. This is a case of the defendant repeatedly trafficking in antiquities,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Campos told Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Rachel Kovner, who handed down the sentence Wednesday.

He was also charged with smuggling three more specific pieces in 2019 — an ancient Egyptian polychrome artifact that broke during the flight into JFK, requiring the help of a restorer to fix, an ancient Roman limestone stele and an ancient Roman limestone head.

“The defendant communicated with individuals in Egypt who had access to illicit dig sites, some of whom were likely looters and grave robbers,” prosecutors wrote in an Aug. 20 sentencing memo. “The defendant flew to Egypt, obtained the artifacts, and returned to New York to then place them for auction at, for example, Palmyra Heritage, Arte Primitivo, and Christie’s.”

Eldarir pleaded guilty to four counts of smuggling in February, the same day jury selection was supposed to start in his trial.

“The defendant looted Egypt’s cultural treasures and lied to U.S. Customs about them as part of a web of deception he spun to illegally fill his pockets with cash,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said Wednesday.

His phone also linked him to several other artifacts, and auction house records show his antiquity scheme dated back to 2011, according to federal court filings.

“The defendant profited off the looting of Egypt’s cultural heritage, and he did so when he could have practiced medicine in Egypt,” prosecutors wrote. “Unlike many other defendants who appear before this Court, this defendant had a viable profession that he could practice —he was a trained, licensed Egyptian physician.”