Was he murdered? Was he the product of incest? Ever since his tomb was discovered in 1922, Tutankhamun has always been a man of mystery. But now the pharaoh is the subject of yet another whodunnit – and this time the mystery is a very modern one.

Did bungling curators snap off Tut’s beard last year, and if so, was it stuck back on with the wrong kind of glue?

These are the allegations levelled this week at the Egyptian Museum, the gloomy, underfunded palace in central Cairo where Tutankhamun’s bling is housed, along with thousands of other ancient treasures. Employees claim the beard was dislodged in late 2014, during routine maintenance of the showcase in which Tut’s mask is kept.

“What happened is that one night they wanted to fix the lighting in the showcase, and when they did that they held the mask in the wrong way and broke the beard,” alleges one museum official, who asked not to be named for fear of being fired. “But they tried to fix it overnight with the wrong material, but it wasn’t fixed in the right way so the next day, very early, they tried to fix it again.

“The problem was that they tried to fix it in half an hour and it should have taken them days.”

Both the director of the museum, Mahmoud el-Halwagy, and the head of its conservation department, Elham Abdelrahman, strenuously denied the claims, in a joint interview yesterday. Halwagy says the beard never fell off, and that without doubt nothing has happened to it since he was appointed director in October.

The issue, he and Abdelrahman maintain, is that well before he arrived at the museum, conservators were concerned that at some point in the future the beard might become loose. So they applied an adhesive – provided and sanctioned by the antiquities ministry – that turned out to be a little too conspicuous.

“This is the problem,” Halwagy said. “It’s too visible.”

Fortunately, by Halwagy’s account, the eagle-eyed director noticed the problem himself soon after arriving in his post, and now the issue is in the hands of an expert committee, who will investigate the issue, and release a report detailing their findings at a later date.

For her part, Abdelrahman is mystified about the source of the breakage claim, and says the museum hierarchy would never have dreamt of covering up such a thing. “If it was broken, it would have been a big problem, and we would have written a report about it,” she said.

If the claim is true, Chris Naunton, director of the Egypt Exploration Society, and the maker of a recent documentary about Tutankhamun, says it may be unprecedented.

“I’ve not heard of the beard being removed before – the death mask is incomparably important and valuable and would normally be handled with the utmost care,” says Naunton, who has viewed photographs of the allegedly damaged mask. “If these are genuine photos, it does look like something happened there. I just couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It just looks too bad to believe.”

Last year, archaeologists alleged that a ministry-sponsored effort had botched the restoration of the world’s oldest pyramid, while other critics say the government’s approach to Egyptology is too rigid and old-fashioned.