Federal authorities are asking American museums to scrutinize their collections for items that they have obtained from a veteran Manhattan art dealer now accused of possessing antiquities stolen from India and other countries.


The dealer, Subhash Kapoor, is under arrest in India, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office has issued a warrant for his arrest in the United States on charges of possessing stolen property. On Thursday investigators seized more than $20 million worth of Asian antiquities from storage units in Manhattan linked to Mr. Kapoor.


Several of the dozens of items seized were bronze and sandstone statues believed to have been looted from temples in India, according to investigators for the office of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.


Before his arrest, Mr. Kapoor, 63, used the Web site (now closed) for Art of the Past, his gallery at 1242 Madison Avenue, at 89th Street, to advertise the many prominent museums to which he had donated or sold items. The list includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif.; and the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington.


The request for museum review was made in a news release that the government posted to announce the seizures.


But several museums said the items they had received from Mr. Kapoor were not antiquities but artwork from later periods.


“The only thing we own that the Freer-Sackler purchased either from Kapoor or the gallery Art of the Past is a 20th-century necklace from India, acquired in 1992,” Allison Peck, a spokeswoman, said. “Fortunately neither an antiquity nor sculpture.”


A spokesman for the Met, Harold Holzer, said it had 81 pieces that had either been donated by or purchased from Mr. Kapoor, starting in 1991, including several antiquities that are on display. But the bulk of the donations were a set of drawings from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries that Mr. Kapoor gave to the museum in 2008 and were the subject of an exhibition in 2009, “Living Line: Selected Indian Drawings From the Subhash Kapoor Gift.”


Mr. Holzer said federal authorities had not made an official request of the museum and that no special review of the Kapoor items was planned, especially since so many of the recent donations were drawings, not antiquities. “They do not appear to be the type of items that they are worried about,” he said.


He also noted that the museum had for years posted all of the items it owns on its Web site, a practice that enables anyone to review, and dispute, the provenance that is listed. In the case of most of the Kapoor items, the only listed provenance is the date when Mr. Kapoor donated them.


Mr. Kapoor, who was extradited this month from Germany to India, where he is facing charges related to trafficking in illicit antiquities, opened his now-shuttered gallery in a ground-floor space in a Madison Avenue apartment building in 1974. The gallery was among the presenters in the inaugural Asian Art Fair at the Park Avenue Armory in 1996.


In a 2009 interview with Apollo magazine, Mr. Kapoor, a native of India, said the drawings that he had donated to the Met were among those he had inherited from his father, whom he had followed into the art-dealing business. “It is my way of giving back to the field,” he was quoted as saying.


It is unclear whether Mr. Kapoor has hired a lawyer to represent him in the criminal charges here. No one affiliated with the gallery has returned phone calls seeking comment on the case.


The items seized from a Manhattan storage unit on Thursday included a bronze sculpture from the Chola Period (late 9th century to 13th century) valued by the authorities at nearly $2.5 million. Investigators said most of the items suspected of having been looted had been reported stolen in the last few years.


In an earlier raid, federal authorities in January seized other antiquities from a storage unit leased by Mr. Kapoor. They estimated the artifacts’ value at $10 million and said they believed that they had been stolen.


Under India’s 1972 Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, no art object over 100 years old may be removed from the country. But in the past few decades antiques from several Indian temples and heritage sites have been auctioned in New York and London.


Indian authorities have been tracking Mr. Kapoor’s imports into the United States since at least 2007, when they first asked United States Customs officials for help in tracking shipments due to arrive in New York. In some cases, federal investigators asserted, Mr. Kapoor created phony histories for objects to disguise their legal status. Several museums on Friday said they were just learning of the government’s request that they review their collections.


The Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, which received a gift of 44 Indian antiquities from Mr. Kapoor in 2007, said those small terra cotta figures were not on display.


Officials at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, where Mr. Kapoor lectured last April 2011, just months before his October arrest in Germany, said that their Asian curator was out of the office Friday but that the museum would review the provenance of any piece it had received from Mr. Kapoor.


A spokeswoman for the Norton Simon Museum said Mr. Kapoor had donated two small terra cotta sculptures in 1997. Leslie C. Denk, the spokeswoman, said, “The museum plans to cooperate with any investigation by federal authorities.”