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       RICHMOND — The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts said this week that it had repatriated 44 works of ancient art that an investigation showed had been stolen or looted from Italy, Egypt and Turkey.

       The works included a 2,500-year-old bronze figure of an Etruscan warrior, a terracotta Italian wine flask from 330 B.C. and a cosmetics container in the form of a god from ancient Egypt, according to a news release from the museum.

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       Most of the pieces had been stolen as part of what the museum called “an international criminal conspiracy involving antiquities traffickers, smugglers and art dealers” being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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       The Etruscan warrior, for instance, was said to have been stolen in 1963 from the Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna, Italy.

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       “The museum takes seriously, and responds to, all restitution claims for works in our collection,” VMFA director and CEO Alex Nyerges said in the news release. “This is not just our policy. It is the right thing to do. We fully support the decision to repatriate these 44 works of ancient art.”

       A spokesperson for Homeland Security Investigations said by email that the museum “has been fully cooperative” with the investigation. The items were seized on Nov. 30; of the 44, one statuette is being returned to Egypt, three coins to Turkey and the rest to Italy — including pottery and “statuettes belonging to a funerary set,” the spokesperson said.

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       The Manhattan D.A.’s office declined to comment.

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       The repatriations come at a time when museums everywhere are grappling with questions of ownership and facing up to a long legacy of Western institutions looting cultural items from around the world.

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       In another recent Virginia case, the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk returned a 19th century marble statue of a Native American warrior to a charitable organization in Massachusetts after the FBI determined that it had been stolen. The Massachusetts group had long thought the statue was destroyed during a move in the 1950s.

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       The VMFA case has been developing for much of this year. According to the museum, officials there received a summons in May from DHS and the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan DA’s office saying that 28 works in the Virginia collection had been identified as possibly stolen.

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       In collecting documentation about the provenance of those items — including receipts, shipping and storage records, importation documents, marketing materials and correspondence — another 29 items were identified that might be of suspicious origin, the museum said. The VMFA submitted information on four more items that it considered worth investigating, bringing the total to 61 pieces.

       Investigators met with museum officials on Oct. 17 and presented “irrefutable evidence” that 44 of the 61 had been stolen or looted from Italy, Egypt or Turkey and should be returned, the museum said.

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       The evidence “left no doubt that the museum does not hold clear title for these 44 works of ancient art,” the VMFA’s chief curator, Michael R. Taylor, said in the news release. “The museum has safely delivered the 44 objects to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which will facilitate the return of these objects to Italy, Egypt and Türkiye.”

       The VMFA said that it has repatriated six other works of art since 2004, including three paintings that had been stolen by Nazis in the World War II era and three items that belonged to the Tlingit tribe and were returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

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