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SINO DAILY
China eyes return of 'stolen' mummy: reports
by Staff Writers
Beijing (AFP) March 23, 2015


Chinese skipper avoids jail term in Japan coral poaching case
Tokyo (AFP) March 23, 2015 - A Japanese court on Monday slapped a Chinese skipper with a fine and suspended jail term for illegally poaching coral in Tokyo's territorial waters.

It is reportedly the first such ruling since the coast guard warned last year that the number of Chinese fishing boats hunting red corals had swelled in waters off Ogasawara, also known as the Bonin islands, in the Pacific far south of mainland Japan.

Red corals are highly prized in China as jewellery.

The Kagoshima district court in southwestern Japan issued a suspended 18-month jail term and three million yen ($25,000) fine against the 34-year-old skipper from China's eastern Anhui province on Monday, after he was caught poaching in mid-November.

Presiding judge Naoyuki Yamada described the poaching as "extremely heinous because it destroyed precious coral resources that take a long time to recover from damage".

A verdict in the case of another Chinese boat captain on similar charges is expected later Monday.

The number of Chinese boats in the area surged to more than 200 in October, a coastguard spokesman told AFP on Monday, but added that the figures have since declined after Japan jacked up fines for illegal fishing in its waters.

Last month, Japanese authorities said they had laid coral-poaching charges against crew from a record 16 Chinese vessels in 2014.

The maximum fine for poaching in territorial waters tripled in November to 30 million yen.

The Japanese coastguard tends to chase off Chinese crews hunting corals in the area and the incidents rarely cause major friction between Tokyo and Beijing, although they remain at loggerheads over ownership of an island chain in the East China Sea.

In October, the South Korean coastguard shot and killed the Chinese skipper of a fishing boat in a confrontation in the Yellow Sea, triggering an angry protest from Beijing.

A Chinese province is seeking the return of a 1,000-year-old mummified monk that experts say was stolen two decades ago and resurfaced at an exhibition in Hungary.

A Buddha statue containing a monk's remains has been on display at the Mummy World Exhibition at Budapest's Hungarian Natural History Museum, which brings together 28 preserved corpses from different cultures around the world.

A spokesman for the Fujian Cultural Relic Bureau told China's official Xinhua news agency that the statue is believed to have been stolen from a temple in Yangchun village.

A mummy statue worshipped since the 12th century went missing from the temple in 1995, it said.

"When I saw the photo (of the Buddha statue) on the TV news, it immediately reminded me of our lost statue," farmer Lin Yongtuan told the state-run China Daily newspaper on Monday.

A message on the Budapest museum's website Monday said that the statue "had been removed and sent back to the Netherlands due to the request of the loaning partner, the Drents Museum".

Xinhua quoted a Drents Museum spokesman as saying the statue belonged to "a Dutch private collector who bought it legally in 1996".

The incident is the latest case of allegedly stolen Chinese artefacts resurfacing abroad. Beijing has made the return of such relics a priority, as it both flexes its growing international clout and seeks to build public support at home.

In 2013, French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault returned two bronze fountainheads from Beijing's Old Summer Palace, whose auction in 2009 outraged China.

The monument was pillaged by British and French troops in 1860 during the Second Opium War, an event seen in China as a national humiliation at the hands of Western armies. Beijing estimates that at least 1.5 million items were looted at the time.


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