A French court has fined four divers for pillaging artefacts from a 57m-deep Roman shipwreck which dates back to the second century BC. Each diver was fined €1,500 (£1,018) for removing the 30 objects, which included Roman wine vases, from the wreck lying off the coast of Ciotat, 24 miles from Marseille in southern France.

The court in Marseille was told that the divers removed the objects from the wreck over a four-year period, between 2001 and 2005. The Roman vessel - which sank en route from Italy with around 1,000 vases of wine on board - was first discovered by divers in 1984.

According to French authorities, other objects may have been removed from the wreck in addition to those taken by the four French divers. Of the 1,000 vases initially recorded when the vessel was first discovered, only 278 had been counted during a 2005 inventory dive.