CAIRO
Egypt on Saturday recovered 239 artifacts that had previously been smuggled to France.
This comes only a day after the Arab state had recovered additional 123 artifacts that had been smuggled to the US in the past.
The return of the art pieces came after the Egyptian government succeeded in proving ownership, sources at Cairo International Airport said.
On Friday, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al-Damati said that over the past ten months, his country had recovered a total of 221 artifacts that had been previously smuggled to the US, Australia, Germany and Denmark.
Saturday's returned pieces raise the total number of recovered artifacts to 460.
There has been a marked increase in the theft of Egyptian antiquities in the years following the 2011 popular uprising that ended the autocracy of longstanding President Hosni Mubarak.
