By Seth Mydans
Published: April 1, 1999

One of the boldest and most destructive temple robberies ever carried out in Cambodia might have gone undiscovered for months or even years if Claude Jacques had not wandered into an antique shop in Thailand last December.

There Mr. Jacques, a French expert on Cambodian antiquities, found himself face to face with a familiar stone inscription from the 12th-century temple of Banteay Chhmar.

Few other people had ever seen the stone or, in recent years, the temple itself -- a remote and unrestored jumble of sagging archways, moss-covered walls, cracked bas-reliefs and weather-worn but still gently smiling stone gods.

''I know that inscription perfectly well, because I worked on it,'' said Mr. Jacques, who visited the temple in 1965 and 1991. ''I could not stay calm.'' The 4-foot-high stone, with its inscribed account of ancient battles, was on sale for $8,000. Mr. Jacques called the Thai police, who impounded it.

But his discoveries were only beginning. The stone inscription turned out to be just a tiny part of the loot from an extended raid on the temple last November and December that officials say was organized by Cambodian military officers using power tools and heavy equipment.

Mr. Jacques and other experts are calling it one of the largest-scale thefts of Cambodian antiquities since the first and most famous of the robbers, the French writer Andre Malraux, carted nearly a ton of stones from Angkor Wat in 1924.

And experts fear that it could be part of a new wave of looting at Cambodia's hundreds of remote and unprotected temples.

As the Khmer Rouge Communist insurgency has collapsed in the last two years, many hidden sites have suddenly become open to looters. Much of Cambodia's countryside remains lawless, and hundreds of temples lie unguarded, unstudied and overgrown with vegetation. The only witnesses to the raid on Banteay Chhmar were the villagers who live around the edges of the temple.

''It's not basic, usual looting,'' said Sebastien Cavalier, a Cambodia-based representative of Unesco. ''It's huge-scale looting.'' He was drenched with sweat in the tropical heat as he stood amid the temple ruins the other day.

''Andre Malraux took maybe 20 statues,'' he said. ''Here it's 500. It's like a case study for looting, every kind of looting, big and small.''

''You can see 12-meter-long walls totally dismantled,'' he said, a length of nearly 40 feet, ''with stones cut into two pieces. You can see looting of heads, looting of pediments, looting of bas-reliefs, illicit excavations.'' In dismantled walls alone, Mr. Cavalier said, more than 500 square feet of bas-relief was chopped into pieces and trucked away.

''You could say it is unfortunately one of the worst damages in the history of the looting of Cambodian temples,'' said Mr. Jacques, who is the special adviser on the Angkor temple complex for Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Mr. Jacques and Mr. Cavalier came here in January to inspect the looting; they already suspected that the damage might be extensive. Just before their trip, the Thai police intercepted trucks near the Cambodian border carrying 117 heavy stone pieces of a dismantled temple wall that the two men later confirmed had come from Banteay Chhmar.

The temple is just 15 miles from the Thai border in a barren corner of northwestern Cambodia that is almost inaccessible by road. To reach it, the researchers traveled by military helicopter, an hour's flight from Siem Reap -- the home of the temple complex of Angkor and the heart of Cambodian civilization -- which dates from the same period as Banteay Chhmar.

When he saw the damage, Mr. Jacques, said, ''I was crying.''

''I was unable to say anything,'' he recalled. ''It was horrible. I had never seen such bad damage, and all for nothing, you know? For money. The small heads they take, they probably have to destroy 10 to get one.''

Uong Von, the director of heritage protection at the Ministry of Culture, said pneumatic drills had been used to chop statues from their bases and dismantle tons of stone bas-relief.

The drills left regular toothmarks along the edges of walls. Freshly sliced stone slabs lie here and there, their sharp edges contrasting with the worn and mossy blocks around them. Statues stand headless and faceless where looters smashed them. Where the inscription of an ancient battle once stood, only a jumble of square stones remains.

''You cannot compare it with the looting at Angkor,'' Mr. Cavalier said. ''It's on a totally different scale. At Angkor the head disappears. At Banteay Chhmar the whole wall disappears. It's as if you have Notre-Dame de Paris and somebody comes and starts to cut off all the pediments.''

As things stand now, there is almost no way to combat the looting.

As many as 1,200 temples are scattered around the country, Mr. Cavalier said, but there is no complete inventory to help officials monitor what needs to be protected and what may have been stolen.

Cambodia's treasures have been looted almost constantly since Malraux's time -- by French and Vietnamese armies, by refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge and by the Khmer Rouge guerrillas themselves.

When the Khmer Rouge were driven from their final stronghold at Anlong Veng last year, officials say, a trove of stolen artifacts was found. Young Chantha, an official at the Cultural Heritage Department, said 20 to 30 tons of antiques had been found at the home of Ta Mok, a Khmer Rouge leader who is now awaiting trial in Phnom Penh.

Though some progress has been made in recent years in returning artifacts to Cambodia and other nations, experts say the trade in antiquities continues to flourish. As efforts grow to choke off the trade in Cambodian art through Thailand, for example, the experts say a new route has appeared through Singapore.

As with much of the looting in Cambodia, official corruption appears to have been involved in the thefts at Banteay Chhmar.

Cambodian officials say they have identified the military unit and the officer responsible for the pillage, though it is not clear whether the looters will be punished.

''If I can find this officer in Division 7, I will not protect him,'' said his superior, Gen. Ko Chhean, sounding a little doubtful. ''It is up to the law. Maybe he should be put on trial.''

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