By AFP

NEW YORK: An antiques dealer pleaded guilty Wednesday to smuggling ancient Egyptian treasures, including a coffin, to the United States.

Mousa Khouli, also known as Morris Khouli, aged 38, faces up to 20 years of prison for “smuggling Egyptian cultural property into the United States and making a false statement to law enforcement authorities,” the federal prosecutor’s office in New York said.

Khouli arranged for the purchase and smuggling of a Greco-Roman style Egyptian coffin, a three-part nesting coffin set, a set of Egyptian funerary boats, and Egyptian limestone figures between October 2008 and November 2009, officials said.

The antiquities were exported from Dubai into the United States with false documentation.

Khouli also settled a civil complaint seeking forfeiture of Egyptian and Iraqi artifacts, prosecutors said.