The head of the British Museum has resigned while an investigation
British Museum
The head of the British Museum has resigned while an investigation is going on about valuable things like gold and special items that might have been taken from the famous museum in London.
British Museum|investigation is going on
The person in charge, Hartwig Fischer, decided to step down, and the people who are in charge of the museum agreed with this decision.
He explained why he made this choice in a statement on Friday. Fischer said, “For the past few days, I’ve been looking very closely at what happened with the things that were taken from the British Museum and the investigation into all of it.”
He also said, “It’s clear that the British Museum didn’t react in the way it should have when there were warnings in 2021. And now we see that there’s a bigger problem.”
Last week, the museum talked about how some things that belonged to the museum were either missing, stolen, or damaged. This caused one of the workers to lose their job, and the police called the Metropolitan Police started looking into it.
The British Museum said, “We’re looking at how we keep things safe in an independent review because some things from the collection have gone missing, been stolen, or got damaged. One worker has lost their job, and we’re also going to take legal action against them,” they also said, “The police that deal with economic crimes, called the Economic Crime Command, are looking into this matter as well.”
The police from the Metropolitan Police said to CNN, a news channel, “We’re working together with the British Museum. Right now, we’re still checking things out. No one has been arrested, but we’re still investigating.”
Most of the things that went missing were small pieces that were being kept in a special room that’s part of the museum’s collections. They were special things like jewelry made of gold, pretty rocks that aren’t very valuable, and glass items. These things come from a very long time ago, from about 15 centuries before Jesus was born to about 19 centuries after.
The museum said, “None of these things were shown to the public recently. They were mostly kept for people to study and learn about.”
Fischer talked about this situation, saying it’s really unusual. George Osborne, who is in charge of the museum, also talked about it. He said it’s a sad time for everyone who loves the museum. But, he added, they’re going to fix what went wrong and learn from it so that the museum becomes even better.