Police say Farhad Hakimzadeh used a scalpel to remove a map by Hans Holbein the Younger from this 16th century book

A prominent Iranian scholar who is head of the UK’s Iran Heritage Foundation — “a charity he formed in 1995 to promote and perserve the history, languages and culture of Iran” — has pleaded guilty to mutilating at least 150 priceless books in the British Library. According to a report in the Guardian by crime reporter Sandra Laville, authorities in London say Farhad Hakimzadeh, 60, “a Harvard-educated businessman, publisher and intellectual, took a scalpel to the leaves of 150 books that have been in the nation’s collection for centuries.” The books were from the library’s collection “charting how Europeans travelled to Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul empire from the 16th century onwards” and Hakimzadeh’s vandalism could go back to 1998, when he first visited the collection. Dr. Kristian Jensen, head of the library’s early printed collections, said, “You cannot undo what he has done and it has compromised a piece of historical evidence which charts the early engagement of Europeans with what we now know as the Middle East and China. It makes me extremely angry. This is someone who is extremely rich who has damaged and destroyed something that belongs to everybody.” He added, “Hakimzadeh is eminently characteristic of our traditional groups of readers: he has a profound knowledge of the field. From my point of view, that makes it worse because he actually knew the importance of what he was damaging. What he did was use the cover of serious scholarly purpose to steal historic pieces and abuse our trust.”