FRANCE and Nigeria have struck an agreement on three statues that were smuggled out of Nigeria and are currently on show in Paris’s Louvre museum, France’s minister for European affairs, Pierre Moscovici, said Tuesday. Nigeria has agreed to allow the 1,500-year-old terracotta figures to remain in Paris on a 25-year renewable basis in return for France’s acknowledgement that they undisputedly remain the property of Nigeria, he said. They would be placed in the new Quai Branly museum, currently under construction. ”The deal should be signed in the next few days,” Moscovici said in response to a question in the French parliament during an examination of an international convention aimed at stopping the smuggling in cultural treasures. Nigeria officially requested the return of the figures, known as the Nok statues, in April. The sculptures were discovered during a mining operation in the beginning of the 1990s, at a time that Nigeria had a law prohibiting the export of any archeological relics, and found their way into the Louvre. – Sapa-AFP