Egyptian officials to face trial over Van Gogh theft

A senior Egyptian cultural official was among 11 people jailed for three years on Tuesday for negligence after the theft of a Van Gogh painting from a Cairo museum, a judicial source said.Vincent Van Gogh's "Poppy Flowers," also known as "Vase with Flowers," was stolen in August in a brazen daytime heist from the Mahmud Khalil museum in a case that highlighted major security lapses in cultural institutions.The head of the culture ministry's fine arts sector, Mohsen Shaalan, and Reem Bahir, the museum's director, as well as nine other officials were convicted of negligence.

A single security guard usually worked in the Cairo museum from which a Van Gogh was stolen and most of its cameras were out of order since 2006, the state news agency MENA reported on Saturday.A prosecution investigation into the theft of the painting, "Poppy Flowers," found the museum had cut the number of guards from 30 to nine, and "most days the number was reduced so that there was only one guard in the museum," MENA reported.It added that 30 out the museum's 47 surveillance cameras installed at the time had stopped working in 2006.

Egypt said on Monday it has informed Interpol and placed its police on alert at the country's entry and exit points to try to recover a Van Gogh stolen from a museum with a broken-down security system."The search is ongoing. We still haven't found the painting," Culture Minister Faruq Hosni told AFP."Police are on alert at the borders and the airports," he said, adding that the interior ministry had informed Interpol of Saturday's theft of the Dutch master's "Poppy Flowers."

By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI 2010-08-22T18:11:51Z CAIRO (AP) -- None of the alarms and only seven out of 43 surveillance cameras were working at a Cairo museum where a Vincent van Gogh painting was stolen, Egypt's top prosecutor said Sunday....

None of the alarms and only seven out of 43 surveillance cameras were working at a Cairo museum where a Vincent van Gogh painting was stolen, Egypt's top prosecutor said Sunday.

Egypt's culture minister Sunday backtracked on a claim that two Italians were arrested with a stolen Van Gogh painting, blaming a subordinate for giving "inaccurate" information."The information ... came from ... Mohsen Shaalan. Despite Shaalan receiving confirmation that the painting was retrieved, the information was inaccurate," the ministry said in a statement.

Egypt's interior minister said on Sunday that an employee working in a Cairo museum was probably behind the theft of a Van Gogh painting that left Egyptian authorities red-faced."There are many circumstances around the theft of the Poppy Flowers that point to the fact that a museum employee participated in the theft or stole it himself," Habib al-Adly told the official MENA news agency."The location and placement inside the museum confirms this," Adly said.

I read these new volumes in December.  There are six large books, two columns to a page, large pages, the whole thing weighs about thirty pounds.  I can't recall taking on such a large reading project in such a short period of time, but I am very glad I spent a few weeks immersed in the world of Vincent van Gogh.  I was impressed by how smart van Gogh was, what an intellectual omnivore h