Man faces jail for defacing rare books

A wealthy Iranian businessman faces jail for cutting pages from rare and priceless books at the British Library and Bodleian in Cambridge.

In a bid to boost his own collection, Farhad Hakimzadeh defaced the books and would replace pages that were missing or damaged with leaves cut from library copies, many of which were publicly owned.

The ten British Library works which he admitted damaging were worth £71,000 alone. Staff said around 150 books were defaced in total, and many of the stolen pages will never be recovered.

The works dated from as early as the 16th century and all concerned European interaction with the Middle East. A map worth £30,000 was cut out of one of the books.

Head of collections at the British Library Dr Kristian Jensen believes he smuggled in a scalpel and positioned himself out of the view of CCTV cameras while stealing the pages.

Dr Jensen said: "He has a profound knowledge of the field. So in a sense from my point of view that makes it worse because he actually knew the importance of what he was damaging."

He added: "Obviously I'm angry because this is somebody extremely rich who has damaged something which belongs to everybody, completely selfishly destroyed something for his own personal benefit which this nation has invested in over generations, so this is something that people have paid for for a very long time.

"Some of the objects which we believe are damaged have been cared for by the nation for centuries."

Hakimzadeh, who is director of the Iranian Heritage Foundation and a published author, initially told police he had bought the suspect books, found in the large library in his Knightsbridge home, second hand.

He pleaded guilty to 14 counts of theft in May.

Some of the cuts Hakimzadeh made were so precise they were barely visible, Dr Jensen said. He called the vandalism "an attack on the nation's collective memory of its own past".

© Independent Television News Limited 2008. All rights reserved.

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