On January 29, 2011, in the midst of the Egyptian protests of that year, Hawass arrived at the Egyptian Museum to find that a number of cases had been broken into and a number of antiquities damaged, so police were brought in to secure the museum [REF].
Hawass later told The New York Times that thieves looking for gold broke 70 objects, including two sculptures of Tutankhamen, and took two skulls from a research lab, before being stopped as they left the museum [REF].