Girl charged after 1.5m euros of gold stolen from museum

[ad_1] A Chinese language-born lady has been charged with the theft of six gold nuggets value about 1.5 million euros ($1.75m; £1.3m) from the Museum of Pure Historical past in Paris final month, French prosecutors have mentioned.

The girl was arrested in Barcelona whereas attempting to get rid of some melted gold, in line with officers, and is being held in pre-trial detention.

Well-known for its stuffed animals and bone collections, the museum is residence to a mineralogy gallery, from which the gold was taken. Police discovered an angle-grinder and a blowtorch on the scene.

The museum's alarm and surveillance techniques had been disabled by a cyber-attack, with the thieves apparently conscious of this, French media reported on the time.

"The thieves, clearly very skilled and well-informed, exploited a safety flaw that had not been recognized over the past audit performed in 2024," a museum spokesperson instructed French newspaper Le Figaro.

Cleaners found the break-in once they arrived for work earlier than daybreak on the museum, which is a part of the Sorbonne college and situated close to the Jardin des Plantes in central Paris.

The suspect was arrested by Spanish police on 30 September on a European arrest warrant and handed over to French authorities on the identical day, officers mentioned in an announcement.

On the time of her arrest, she was in possession of round a kilogram of melted-down gold. Investigations are persevering with, the assertion added. It's believed she was making ready to go away for China.

One of many largest stolen nuggets, initially from Australia, weighs 5kg. On the present gold value, it might be value round €585,000.

"We're coping with a particularly skilled workforce, completely conscious of the place they wanted to go, and with skilled tools," Emmanuel Skoulios, the museum director, instructed French broadcasters.

"It's completely not by probability that they went for these particular gadgets," he instructed France 2 tv final month.

The costs come simply days after thieves made off with priceless French crown jewels from the Louvre Museum in a separate, daring raid.

On Sunday, "skilled" thieves broke into the world's most-visited museum, stealing eight valued gadgets earlier than escaping on scooters. The raid took lower than eight minutes, police mentioned.

Specialists instructed the BBC that the gadgets are prone to be damaged up and bought for a fraction of their value.

"This may not be their first heist," Dutch artwork detective Arthur Model mentioned of the thieves on Monday.

"They've achieved issues earlier than, different burglaries. They're assured they usually thought, 'we would get away with this', and went for it."

At the least 4 French museums - together with the Louvre and the pure historical past museum - have been robbed in current months, in line with media studies.