Finds recovered in Lancashire Museum Store Investigation

I was really hoping it would turn out that the objects reported as missing from a Lancashire Museum store would turn up in the wrong cupboard and the case was one of muddled paperwork. It seems however that some finds have been turned up in the course of the investigation outside the store. We should be cautious, according to the press release, whether or not they actually have come from inside the store has not yet (it seems) been ascertained. One man has however been arrested in Ludlow, 160 km south of the storeroom in question, as a suspect (rather than just witness) in what is being termed a "theft".  

Press Release by Lancashire Police

Detectives investigating the suspected theft of items from a Lancashire museum have arrested a man.
Earlier this year we received a report of the theft of artefacts from the Lancashire Council Museum Service.
Following further enquiries, Lancashire Police, supported by colleagues from West Mercia Police, executed a warrant in Ludlow on Friday (December 16). Further searches took place in Ludlow and Hereford.
A quantity of suspected stolen property was recovered at the address with one man arrested by officers. If anyone has any information about the alleged thefts or believes that they can help with our enquiries, please call 101 or email forcecontrolroom@lancashire.police.uk, quoting investigation number 04/116599/22.
If you have any enquiries regarding the status of a particular find, such as whether it has been affected by this incident, then please contact the Lancashire Council Museum Service.
A 31-year-old man from Ludlow was arrested on suspicion of theft. He has been released on bail pending further enquiries.

Are the items being examined now from the store, or have the police nabbed a collector or eBay dealer 'on spec' or information received and are just going through their holdings as a matter of routine? Venues like eBay need much closer and more systematic monitoring to look out for suspected illicit/illegal artefacts. Britain, one of the biggest antiquities markets in the world, is doing nothing to achieve this. 

If the person is arrested on suspicion of "theft" rather than "handling", this suspected theft raises all sorts of questions involving the security of a store that someone from such a distance could access. According to a Lancashire museum service insider anxious that the public should know what steps they take to ensure security, a thief would have had to access the secure store through three locked doors, plus know where the associated records were because it seems these were also removed to cover up the disappearance.

Perhaps a burglar was reading about the way certain papyri reportedly recently disappeared from a certain UK university's "secure stores" together with the associated paperwork and then some of them allegedly appearing on the market? If this were the case, somebody perhaps hoped in this way to obliterate the backstory (and even previous existence) of the objects they passed onto the market. It seems archaeological records need better safeguarding than they have had until now.

If this was an outside job, it would require a lot of planning and time, in which case, the fact that it was not detected until the objects were far away is disturbing. It also seems that the objects that so far have been reported missing (by finders and landowners who had deposited them in the museum store and then later found out they were no longer there) other objects may be the tip of the iceberg. Having found a way into the store, like Ali Baba and his brothers, it seems the burglar may have continued to remove items over a period of time in a way that is still difficult to detect. Hence the police attempting to find out if other members of the public have material in the museum that they want peace of mind about its whereabouts. The public has the right to know, how safe are other assets still in that store?