The Paris Natural History Museum heist marks another incident in a growing trend of high-profile robberies in Europe
A Chinese national has been charged with a €1.5 million gold theft last month at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, Franceinfo reported on Tuesday, citing prosecutors.
The disappearance of almost 6 kilos of gold was discovered by museum staff on the morning of September 16. The nuggets were part of a permanent exhibition.
According to prosecutors, the stolen items included Bolivian nuggets donated to the Academy of Sciences in the 18th century, pieces from Russia’s Ural region gifted by Tsar Nicholas I in 1833, and nuggets from California dating back to the gold rush. Among them was a gold nugget weighing more than 5 kg, found in Australia in 1990.
Police found signs of forced entry on two doors, each cut with an angle grinder, leaving openings slightly larger than a sheet of A4 paper. Security footage showed a small woman dressed in black slipping through one of the holes shortly after 1 a.m.
The suspect used a blowtorch to break a display case containing the nuggets before leaving the building around 4 a.m. Investigators said she was wearing a hat with a veil covering her face similar to a beekeeper’s net and that she looked like a circus performer. Tools recovered at the scene also included a screwdriver, saws and gas cylinders.
Police tracked the suspect through phone records and determined that she left France the same day heading to China. She was later detained at Barcelona airport, where agents confiscated almost 1 kg of melted gold.
The case joins a growing list of high-profile museum thefts across Europe and beyond. Earlier this month, thieves stole Napoleonic jewels worth an estimated €88 million ($102 million) from the Louvre. A Picasso painting valued at $650,000 disappeared last week on its way to a Spanish museum. In September, a 3,000-year-old gold bracelet was stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Four pieces of historical art, including a roughly 2,500-year-old gold helmet, were also removed from the Drents Museum in the Netherlands in January.
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