Doctor turned smuggler gets six months for bringing hundreds of Egyptian artifacts to U.S.

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 un