January 28th Looting in the Museum

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Cairo-based egyptologist Nicole Hansen writes conspiratorially on the Facebook "Save the Egyptian Museum" group:

Someday hopefully the truth what really happened at the museum, the aftermath of that and the response and motivations behind that response from various parties will come out but until then all I can say is that what we are told by various parties does not correspond at all to the facts or logic.

Including what we are being told by the Museum, a whole lot of illogical and contradictory nonsense. From my own sifting through the evidence, including taking a good look at first hand at what was left of the traces in the museum after the cleanup, I am sure Lawrence Rothfield in the Guardian is close to the truth:

Much remains unclear about the incident, including whether "the whole thing was a well-controlled gambit to persuade the international community that the country was descending into chaos and that the revolt needed to be crushed", he said.

That is, I think, precisely what the evidence we have shows happened. Nobody swung Tarzan-like down from the unbroken skylights looking for red mercury or anything else. The vandals who smashed cases on the first floor (and broke into one case on the ground floor) were already in the museum when it closed for the evening, and came up from the vicinity of the security post at the bottom of the Southeast stairwell. They knew what they were doing and where they were going, went straight to the Tutankhamun gallery, and fanned out from there causing contrived mayhem. This would therefore mean that the identity of these men was known to the authorities, and if this is so, it suggests that the location of the "missing" artefacts is therefore also known (as is suggested by the stories about how they have been "surfacing" since then). If so, who is currently holding them where, and for what purpose?
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