Champa antiques handed over to museum

      Police of the central province of Quang Ngai on April 22 handed over some Champa antiques to the Quang Ngai Museum.
The antiques include some jewellery, worshipping objects made of gold and silver and some pottery products.
The local police reclaimed these antiques from a man named Nguyen Thanh Lam, 79, in Thach Tru village, Duc Lan commune, Mo Duc district, Quang Ngai province.
The Deputy Director of the Quang Ngai provincial Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Nguyen Dang Vu, said that preliminary tests show that these things are Champa antiques dating back to the 9th and 10th centuries.
Nguyen Thanh Lam and some men dug up a jar, containing gold, silver and pottery-made jewellery and worshipping objects while they were searching for scrap iron in September 2007.
Lam sold around 2kg of the antiques to a strange man for US$2,200. He changed $1,700 into Vietnamese dong at a local bank and gave some money to others.
The case was detected and local police seized the remaining antiques.