US authorities have returned 36 looted antiquities valued at more than $5 million to Syria, including a monumental funerary relief taken from the ancient city of Palmyra and a collection of mosaics seized during investigations into antiquities trafficking.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the repatriation on Wednesday, saying the pieces had been recovered through investigations involving museums, collectors and suspected trafficking networks.

“Repatriation ceremonies are a powerful reminder that preserving cultural heritage transcends any border or nationality,” Bragg said. He described the investigation as a complicated operation involving international partners.

Among the returned objects is a limestone funerary relief made in Palmyra in the late second century CE. The sculpture, weighing more than 1,000lb — about 450kg — depicts a reclining man surrounded by a woman and three children.

The district attorney’s office said the relief had been cut from the wall of a Palmyrene tomb and smuggled to Dubai before Islamic State militants caused extensive destruction at Palmyra between 2015 and 2017. UNESCO has documented widespread damage to monuments, statues and the archaeological site after the group captured the city in 2015.

Fourteen mosaics looted from a Roman villa in Syria were also among the objects returned. Prosecutors said those works and the Palmyra relief were among 31 Middle Eastern and North African antiquities allegedly trafficked into New York by Lebanese antiquities dealer Georges Lotfi.

Lotfi is the subject of a Manhattan arrest warrant issued in 2022 and an Interpol Red Notice issued the following year. The allegations against him have not been proven in court, and the district attorney’s office says he is presumed innocent unless convicted.

Another highlight is the Telete and Eros Mosaic, a large mosaic panel depicting a mythological wedding scene involving Eros, Telete, Aphrodite and the Three Graces. Prosecutors said it was seized in July 2021 alongside 22 other Syrian and Lebanese mosaics from a storage unit belonging to Lotfi.

Three female Syro-Hittite idols dating to the second millennium BCE were also returned. The district attorney’s office said they first appeared on the art market in the late 1980s and early 1990s before being acquired by US collector Michael Steinhardt.

Four of the 36 objects came from Steinhardt’s collection. In 2021, prosecutors seized 180 antiquities valued at $70 million from him under an agreement that also imposed a lifetime ban on his acquiring antiquities.

Thirteen of the returned objects had been seized from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Manhattan prosecutor’s office says it has seized 402 antiquities valued at $98.7 million from the museum since 2017.

Syria’s foreign ministry said the objects were handed over at a ceremony in New York as part of efforts to combat illicit trafficking and return cultural property to its country of origin. The ministry said US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, US envoy Thomas Barrack, Syrian chargé d’affaires Mohamad Naser Kanatri and Syria’s UN ambassador Ibrahim Olabi were among those attending.

Kanatri said Syrian-American co-operation had allowed “a part of Syria’s history” to return home and described cultural heritage protection as an area capable of building lasting links between the countries.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit says it has recovered more than 6,400 cultural objects valued at $495 million and returned more than 6,200 of them to 40 countries.