Soldier charged with selling Egyptian antiques

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. Army helicopter pilot once stationed in Cairo will face charges of selling dozens of stolen Egyptian antiquities to a Texas art dealer, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Edward Johnson was arrested on Tuesday and is scheduled to appear in Alabama federal court on Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York said.

According to the complaint, Johnson was stationed in Cairo in September 2002, when 370 pre-dynastic artifacts were stolen from the Ma'adi Museum near Cairo.

In January 2003, Johnson contacted a Texas art dealer with a collection of Egyptian antiquities, the complaint said.

Johnson told the dealer, who is not named in the complaint, that his grandfather had acquired the antiquities in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s, and that they had remained in the family.

The dealer purchased about 80 pieces for $20,000 and later consigned pieces from that collection to galleries and collectors in New York, London, Zurich, and Montreal.

But two experts who examined photographs of the antiquities concluded that many of the pieces were among those taken from the Ma'adi Museum, the complaint said.

The Ma'adi antiquities, which date to 3000 B.C. and earlier, had been excavated from an archeological site in Egypt during the 1920s to 1930s.

The complaint does not charge Johnson with stealing the artifacts and does not say how he is suspected of obtaining them. A lawyer for Johnson could not be reached for comment.

(Reporting by Edith Honan, editing by Michelle Nichols)