Smuggled Iranian carving worth £30m seized at airport by UK border patrol

Dr St John Simpson of the British Museum with the looted Sasanian rock relief. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

It was carved almost 2,000 years ago and is such an important sculpture that if it appeared on the art market today it could fetch more than £30m.

But this is a previously unrecorded antiquity that can never be sold. For the large fragment of a Sasanian rock relief – which depicts an imposing male figure carved in the 3rd century AD – has been freshly gouged from a cliff in Iran with an angle grinder.