AP police seek to quiz Hasan Ali

HYDERABAD: The Hyderabad Police have come to the conclusion that Pune-based stud farm owner Hasan Ali Khan might have stashed away at least some of the 267 artefacts, stolen from the Salarjung Museum and belonging to the Nizam, in the Union Bank of Switzerland.Following this new lead, the Central Crime Station officials have moved a petition in the Nampally Criminal Court seeking permission to question Hasan Ali who is currently in judicial remand in Mumbai.Highly placed sources told Express that during an audit done by the museum officials, “635 items were found to be either missing or written off or damaged.” An expert committee was appointed in 1994 to probe the matter in detail and subsequently, a CBI probe was also ordered.The CBI officials traced 347 items and declared the remaining 267 as lost. One of the missing items, a wooden photograph of a duck, was specifically declared stolen and a case was registered in the Mirchowk police station. Most of the 267 missing artefacts are water coloured paintings.“We suspect that Hasan Ali might have accessed some of the 267 missing artefacts since he had been actively involved in the sale of antiques for several decades. We found that after the museum was shifted to its existing premises near Dabeerpura in 1966 from the erstwhile Deewan Dewdi in the Old City, there was a mismatch in the inventory. In 1966, an English inventory was prepared. There used to be an Urdu inventory when the Central government took over the museum in 1961,” the sources said.As per the Urdu inventory, there were 44,000 artefacts. “It was only in 1994 that the authorities  prepared a photo album of every item and found some missing,” sources said.