A Chinese woman has been arrested and charged over the September theft of gold worth more than €1.5 million from the Natural History Museum in Paris, one of several recent break-ins targeting high-profile French cultural institutions, a prosecutor said on Tuesday.
The theft took place on 16 September, just over a month before the audacious jewellery heist at the Louvre on Sunday.
The museum’s director said it was carried out by an “extremely professional team”.
The 24-year-old Chinese national was arrested at Barcelona airport on 30 September, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said.
She was handed over to French authorities on 13 October and charged with theft and criminal conspiracy, and placed in provisional detention the same day.
Investigations showed she had left France on the day of the break-in and was preparing to return to China.
At the time of her arrest, she was trying to dispose of nearly 1 kilogram of melted gold pieces, the prosecutor said, without providing more details.
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‘Priceless’ historical value
A Natural History Museum curator discovered the theft of the gold nuggets after a cleaner reported debris on site.
The stolen items included nuggets from Bolivia donated in the 18th century, some from Russia’s Ural region gifted by Tsar Nicholas I in 1833, and some from California dating to the gold rush era. A 5 kilogram nugget from Australia discovered in 1990 was also taken, said Beccuau.
Nearly 6 kilograms of native gold was stolen, with a value estimated at €1.5 million she added, noting that the historical and scientific value of the pieces was “priceless”.
Native gold is a metal alloy containing gold and silver in their natural, unrefined form.
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‘A circus artist’
Investigators found that two museum doors had been cut with an angle grinder and the display case breached using a blowtorch. Tools including a blowtorch, grinder, screwdriver, gas cylinders and saws were recovered nearby.
Surveillance footage showed a lone intruder entering the museum shortly after 1am and leaving at around 4am, according to Beccuau.
“We thought she was a circus artist,” said a police officer who reviewed surveillance footage from the museum, showing a woman dressed entirely in black slipping through a hole barely larger than an A4 sheet of paper, according to French broadcaster TF1.
Beccau added: “The investigation continues, particularly to analyse this gold, to search for what happened to the stolen items, and to identify possible accomplices.”
Police are also still on the hunt for thieves who stole priceless royal jewels from the Louvre museum in a spectacular daylight robbery on Sunday, which has reignited a row over a lack of security in France’s museums.
(with AFP)
