VANISHING ACT

Potentially Stolen Relics in $42M Home Edited Out of Luxury Mag Photos, Experts Claim

The Cambodian government says the statues could be from a sacred site.

Pictures of a $42 million San Francisco mansion featured in Architectural Digest were doctored to remove sculptures which the Cambodian government says might have been stolen, according to a Washington Post report. An image of the property’s two-story courtyard that was included in the magazine’s coverage showed empty pedestals along one side of the square. But images on the website of the home’s architect show the pedestals topped with ancient Khmer statues. A Cambodian investigation into looted relics claims some of their country’s most important stolen relics appear to have ended up in the collection associated with the family of the property’s owners, Sloan Lindemann Barnett and Roger Barnett, though they have not been accused of wrongdoing. “Some of these statues are of enormous historical and cultural importance to Cambodia and should be repatriated as soon as possible,” Phoeurng Sackona, the country’s minister of culture, told The Washington Post.