Hyderabad, May 1 -- Embroidered tapestry cloth of the Kaaba. Tiles from a mosque in Uzbekistan. A golden dome built to look like a medieval Syrian bathhouse. These were not museum acquisitions - they belonged to Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier convicted of sex crimes, who used some of Islam's most sacred objects to decorate a building on his private Caribbean island.

Millions of pages of records released by the US Justice Department in January this year tell the full story. The New York Times, which reviewed the documents, reported that the trail leads from Mecca's holiest shrine straight to a man who was later arrested on sex trafficking charges.

'Mosque' on his private island

For years, nobody quite knew what the blue-and-whi...