Italian prosecutors on Wednesday named a New York art gallery as a key link in what they say was a vast conspiracy to market stolen artifacts that allegedly involved a former J. Paul Getty museum curator on trial here.

Prosecutor Paolo Ferri presented documents and testimony he said proved Manhattan's Merrin Gallery served as a conduit for artifacts smuggled out of Italy by a Swiss-based dealer and then resold to various U.S. museums, including the Getty in Los Angeles.

Calls seeking comment from the gallery were not returned Wednesday.

Former Getty antiquities curator Marion True and art dealer Robert Hecht are accused of receiving and conspiring to deal in illegally acquired antiquities. The defendants, both Americans, deny wrongdoing.

The case against True involves about 35 artifacts acquired by the museum between 1986 and the late 1990s - including bronze Etruscan pieces, frescoes and painted Greek vessels.

The Rome trial is part of a wider effort by Italian authorities to crack down on antiquities trafficking and recover artifacts they contend were illegally stolen or exported from Italy and sold to European and U.S. museums.

Taking the stand in Wednesday's session was prosecution witness Giuseppe Putrino, a Carabinieri paramilitary police officer who took part in the investigation into Gianfranco Becchina, a Basel, Switzerland-based art dealer.

Putrino presented documents seized in Becchina's offices that discussed what he said were Merrin's purchases of various ancient artifacts, including a sarcophagus and a marble head of the 2nd century Roman emperor Commodus. The statue and the sarcophagus were later bought by the Getty, he said.

"Of all these objects there is no trace, no documents of their export from Italy," Putrino said, indicating he believed the objects were illegally smuggled out of the country.

"This is the prosecution's theory: Becchina equals Merrin and from there the artifacts left for various museums," including the Getty, Ferri said.

Ferri didn't address whether there was any direct link between Merrin and True or Hecht. However, he said the Becchina-Merrin relationship was part of a broader conspiracy to traffic in artifacts that involved the Americans on trial.

Putrino also showed judges a 1993 fax from the Merrin gallery to Becchina's gallery requesting that photos of artifacts sent to be shown to potential customers not be marked with the initials "BEC."

"Our deduction was that they were asking not to put the name Becchina because the customers could have understood the origin of these artifacts," he said.

Ferri has asked that Becchina be indicted in the same trial and said he had been convicted in a separate case for receiving and trafficking in stolen art.

Asked by reporters during a break in the session if he would seek the indictment of Edward and Samuel Merrin - identified in court as the father and son principals of the Merrin Gallery - Ferri said a decision had not yet been made.

Calls placed to the home of Edward Merrin were referred to the gallery; there was no listed phone number in the New York area for his son.

Last year in an unrelated case, the two were indicted in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on conspiracy and wire fraud charges for allegedly defrauding major gallery customers out of millions of dollars over a 10-year period.

Lawyers for True and Hecht said that Wednesday's testimony in the Rome court was a broad look on the world of art dealers and had no bearing on their clients.

Efforts by authorities to fight art trafficking go well beyond the Rome court. In February, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to return 21 looted artifacts to Italy in exchange for loans of other treasures.

Greece, meanwhile, is demanding the return of four ancient artifacts from the Getty it claims were looted. In a series of raids earlier this month, police found nearly 300 unregistered antiquities in an Athens house and a villa on a remote Aegean island.