A French tourist spent eight days in a Luxor police station. She was detained at the airport with a souvenir purchased at the hotel and charged with exporting Egyptian cultural heritage, Le Figaro reported last week.
After a 10-day tour with a Nile cruise, the 56-year-old woman was planning to return home on January 26. While going through security, the officers’ attention was drawn to a small figurine in her luggage. The discreet figure aroused suspicion — was this smuggling of an ancient artifact?!
Experts were urgently invited: two out of three experts recognized it not as a simple trinket, but as a valuable object 4,500 years old. The tourist was removed from the flight and arrested.
The next day, the French woman told the court that she purchased the figurine for 250 euros in a shop at the Sofitel Winter Palace Luxor hotel. The representative of the souvenir shop explained from which workshop he receives copies of truly real works of ancient Egyptian art. At this point, the trial was terminated, and the tourist was recognized as a bona fide buyer.
But the misadventures were not over: the foreigner was again taken to the police station, and it took several more days to complete the paperwork to leave the country. The only indulgence was that at night I slept on the sofa in one of the offices, and spent the day in a common cell with several dozen other detainees.
Upon arrival in Paris — a lawyer by profession — she decided to seek justice, at least hoping for the return of the souvenir confiscated from her.