Shiva request not passed on to gallery

AN international investigation into whether a 900-year-old Indian artefact at the NGA was looted appears to have hit gridlock.

AN international investigation into whether a 900-year-old Indian artefact at the National Gallery of Australia was looted appears to have hit gridlock.

Indian investigators claim their formal request for information about a 1.3m tall statue of Shiva that they suspect was looted from India are being ignored. Gallery staff say no request for co-operation has been received.

The NGA's dancing Shiva statue, which it calls Shiva as Lord of the Dance (Nataraja), came to international attention in August when it was found to resemble a statue identified as having been stolen from a temple in Tamil Nadu in 2008, the same year the gallery bought it from disgraced dealer Subhash Kapoor.

Kapoor was a Manhattan trader for four decades until he was arrested on an Interpol warrant in Germany and extradited to India accused of being the mastermind of a vast looting and smuggling ring.

In New York, investigators seized artefacts valued at more than $US20 million from his two warehouses.

Kapoor has been detained in India since his extradition, while investigators in India and the US establish the case that spans several continents and is expected to involve many more items than those seized. The NGA's Nataraja appears central to those investigations.

The NGA acquired Shiva as Lord of the Dance in 2008 for an undisclosed sum believed to have been $US2m. It is one of 21 items bought from Kapoor over a number of years.

India's high commission in Canberra yesterday confirmed it had received a request for the gallery's co-operation from the Tamil Nadu police on March 14 via India's Central Bureau of Investigation.

That request was forwarded to the Attorney-General's Department but a spokesman for the National Gallery said the request never reached the gallery.

The Attorney-General's Department could not explain the breakdown and a spokesman said he was forbidden from discussing it.