New York-based art dealer due in court over sale of hundreds of items police claim were stolen from country’s temples

The police officers had waited since mid-morning. Hidden among the bustle of an Indian market, they watched, handguns at the ready. Around them, women haggled for vegetables and hurried office workers bought cheap fried chicken. Shortly after noon, the officers saw their target: a motorised rickshaw, carrying a cargo rarely found in this ordinary neighbourhood in the southern city of Chennai.

Within minutes, a 38-year-old suspect was in custody and two 11th-century bronze idols worth several million dollars were safely stowed in an official lockup. The only police squad in India dedicated to fighting the longstanding problem of the theft of valuable idols from the country’s temples to sell on international markets had chalked up another successful operation.

“The idol squad is never idle,” says the team’s leader, additional director general of police, Prateep V Philip, with a smile.

The squad, formed more than 30 years ago in Chennai, capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, has seen a spurt of activity in recent years – and especially recent weeks. In the days after the two idols were seized from the rickshaw in June, six others were recovered. This month the squad’s biggest case so far is scheduled to come before the courts.

It involves Subash Kapoor, a New York-based art dealer who, over a 30-year career, is alleged to have sold hundreds of stolen works. An investigation in the US has led to the seizure of more than 2,000 artworks worth an estimated $100m (£64m). Kapoor, detained in Germany in 2011 and brought to Chennai to face trial, has denied any wrongdoing. US officials believe he sold items stolen across south Asia, from Afghanistan to Burma, and have described him as “one of the most prolific commodity smugglers in the world today”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Subash Kapoor in a prison bus outside Jayankondam court in Tamil Nadu. Photograph: Simon de Trey-White/Eyevine

“All charges against him are cooked [up]. He has not committed any offence,” says Kingston Jerrold, Kapoor’s lawyer in Chennai, adding that his client would be pleading not guilty.

The trial will focus attention on the illegal trade in religious artworks stolen from India’s temples and eventually sold to wealthy institutions and individuals in the west, the Middle East and China. Tamil Nadu, a vast state with an immensely rich religious cultural heritage, is a key source. Chennai’s port is a major shipment point.

Philip says his team has recovered almost 800 idols in 10 years, most of them taken from temples in remote parts of Tamil Nadu.

“There is no internal demand for these things in India. It all goes overseas,” he says. “We have so much history; these are countries which have so little history. So there is a demand which the criminals meet, and we try to stop them.”

Items are usually stolen to order after being identified by specialists. They are then hidden in consignments of other goods – even marble garden furniture – with their true provenance disguised by forged documents establishing a history of sale and resale which has deceived experts from leading institutions.

Those who first break into the poorly secured temples receive a fraction of the value of their loot. Police said the robbers detained after the rickshaw raid in June had been local criminals who were paid 25,000 rupees (£260) to break into temples in the far south of Tamil Nadu. Philip says his team ha s also detained the suspected intermediaries and is “tracing out” the international clients.

The investigation into Kapoor’s business has embarrassed a number of leading institutions. Earlier this year, a spectacular 900-year-old sculpture of the god Shiva was returned by Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister, on a visit to Delhi. It had been bought by the National Gallery of Australia, in Sydney, from Kapoor for AU$5.1m (£2.4m).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, with Australia’s Tony Abbott and the returned Shiva sculpture. Photograph: Prakash Singh/AFP

This autumn, German chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to bring home, as a goodwill gesture, an idol of the goddess Durga which had been sold to a museum in Stuttgart for $250,000. Official requests have also been made to Singapore for the restitution of 30 works in its Asian Civilisations Museum. In the US, items in museums have been seized by the authorities.

The problem of theft is not limited to southern India. There are reports in the country’s newspapers of idols or other valuables being stolen from religious buildings India. Crime figures show about 1,000 recorded thefts every year, officials say. In May six idols were taken from a temple complex in the western state of Rajasthan while others taken from a temple in northern Himachel Pradesh were recently found buried after police traced a local gang.

Recent fears that the earthquake in Nepal could lead to a surge of art theft there appear ungrounded, however. Hundreds of temples were damaged in the 7.3-magnitude quake, which killed more than 8,000 people. “When the earthquake hit, communities came together to secure their heritage,” says Dr Donna Yates, a specialist in the theft of sacred art at Glasgow University.

Attempts to tackle the problem in India are crippled by the lack of a comprehensive register of sacred objects, and their sheer number.

“One specific challenge … in a place like India is the massive quantity of sacred objects. They are everywhere: in small shrines, little temples, huge sacred complexes. These items can’t be removed to a museum, for the most part, or simply locked away or they lose their sacred function. If people cannot interact with the gods, it is pretty much the same as if the gods have been stolen,” says Yates.

Experts and law enforcement officers are now calling for international efforts. The officers of the idol squad in Chennai said western nations can make a difference by checking consignments arriving from India rather than waiting for Indian authorities to alert them to a potential problem.

“It should be a stain on their conscience that these stolen idols are even in their countries,” Philip says.

• This article was amended on 4 August 2015 to correct the name and job title of Prateep V Philip.