Dr Donny George gives the first detailed assessment of the looting to The Art Newspaper. The Art Newspaper: It was the public galleries of the museum which were looted first. On the eve of the war, how many objects remained on display? Dr Donny George: We had moved out thousands of objects from the showcases, everything we could. TAN: How many were you unable to move? DG: There were something like a hundred which were either too heavy or too fragile - but among them were some very important pieces. TAN: Presumably the vast majority of the 170,000 items in the collection were therefore in the vaults. How much was lost from the vaults? DG: We have only looked through a hole and shone a torchlight into the vaults. We don't yet know what is missing, but a lot of the objects are still there. TAN: Was it a small or a large proportion of the collection which was looted in the vaults? DG: I don't know. From the traces of what I have seen it could be a small percentage of the 170,000 objects. We will have to check our registers to see exactly what is missing. TAN: What about the gold treasures of Nimrud? A year ago The Art Newspaper was told that they were in a vault of the central bank. Has the bank vault been looted? DG: I believe the Nimrud gold is safe. We have sent someone with Ambassador John Limbert, who is one of the assistants of General Jay Garner. Ambassador Limbert is responsible for culture. They tried to get into these vaults, but the central bank building had been bombed and they could not reach them. We believe that nobody reached the gold treasures. TAN: What was in the vaults? Along with Nimrud gold, had the museum's gold coin collection been taken there? And what else should be in the central bank? DG: A lot. TAN: Were there thousands or tens of thousands of museum objects in the central bank vault? DG: Thousands. TAN: What else from the museum collection had been removed for safety just before war? V DG: We also took thousands of manuscripts to another place. TAN: So you had another hiding place, in addition to the central bank? DG: Yes. We tried to save portable objects, by putting some things here and some there. We did our best to protect the collection. TAN: And what about the museum records? The meaning of objects comes from knowing where they were excavated. DG: A lot of our paper records are safe. Most of the computerised data we had backed up. TAN: Outsiders were shocked that the museum appeared to have been vandalised. Were objects deliberately smashed? DG: My theory is that there were two groups of people. Those who first entered the museum knew what they wanted and they took some very important material. We found glass cutters they had left and they did not touch gypsum replicas. The vandalism came later, but perhaps it was planned to cover up the initial looting. They smashed a lot of material. We had some very important Roman statues from Hatra - they were smashed and the heads taken away. TAN: But was the damage caused by people looking for valuables, rather than deliberate? DG: Yes, it was people looking for valuables, at least in the galleries and the vaults. But as for what happened in our offices, that was deliberate vandalism.