Police seeks tighter control over antiques trade

A dubious complaint filed by a man about a rare artifact saw a senior police official calling for regulating the trade of antiques and instituting a mechanism to verify their ownership. The Arab suspect was charged with filing a false report and inflating the value of artifacts that were reportedly snatched from him. "There should be a mechanism making it compulsory to obtain a permit to sell antique pieces and investigating the ownership of undocumented pieces," said Brigadier Khalil Ebrahim Al Mansouri, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of Dubai Police. Pure gold Earlier, the suspect had filed a complaint stating that a book made of pure gold and worth $500,000 (Dh1.83million) had been snatched from him as he was meeting a potential buyer. The complainant, M.H.A., told police that the middleman and the buyer beat him up and took away the book, along with another book and a briefcase containing Dh100,000 when he went to Dubai's Muhaisna area to show them the books. It later emerged that the alleged robber was a friend of the middleman. Investigations revealed that the books were only worth Dh100,000, and that there never was any cash in the briefcase. From gulfnews.