On October 21, local time, the French news agency: A 24-year-old Chinese woman has been formally charged and detained on suspicion of participation in organizing gang theft of gold from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.。
According to reports, women At the time of his arrest, he was trying to melt nearly a kilogram of gold.
Earlier, on September 17, the French National Museum of Natural History that unidentified persons stole several pieces of original gold from the museum. According to the museum, the incident caused material losses of about 600,000 euros, but the cultural value carried by the stolen original gold specimens is difficult to estimate.
French commercial FM TV quoted the prosecutor's office as saying that a cleaner found a specimen stolen in the mineral hall of the museum on the morning of 16th. It is believed that criminals broke into the theft from the night of 15th to the early 16th.
The surveillance video shows a woman in black clothes plunging into the museum before the closure and hiding inside the exhibition hall. She did not break the door by violence, but used the chaos before the closure to "lock herself" inside the museum, a common "indigo" practice in the museum.
At about 1 o’clock in the morning, she used a corner mill (a high-speed rotary cutting tool) to cut off two security doors in the museum. These doors were steel structures, thick up to a few centimeters, and the cutting process produced an intense noise, but because the museum was located in a relatively remote botanical garden and no one was noticed in the morning, her actions were left undetected.
After the cutting, she entered the Gallery of Geology and Mineralogy and headed straight to the glass showcase where the gold nuggets were stored.
The display cabinet is designed with bulletproof glass and equipped with infrared sensors and vibration alarms, but the suspect is fully prepared. She took out the oxyacetylene welding gun (a high-temperature flame cutting tool) she was carrying. The flame temperature reached 3000 degrees Celsius and melted the glass in a few minutes. The entire destruction process lasted less than 10 minutes and did not trigger any alarms.
The remains of the site include a corner grinder, a screwdriver, three gas tanks for welded guns and a saw, which later became key material evidence.
"A total of 4 to 5 gold nuggets were stolen, some of which date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, with a total weight of about 6kg, one of which weighed 5kg and was the size of a football. It was purchased 20 years ago."Emmanuel Scurios, deputy curator, said that gold is an "extremely sought-after" metal that is "easier to resell than precious stones".
Stolen Bolivian nuggets
According to the Paris prosecutor’s office, the stolen gold includes: Gold nuggets donated by Bolivia to the French Academy of Sciences in the 18th century; Ural gold nuggets presented to the museum by Russian Tsar Nicholas I in 1833; Gold nuggets found during the California gold rush in the mid-19th century; And a gold nugget weighing more than 5 kilograms found in Australia in 1990.
The suspect carried the nuggets away in a backpack and tried to cover up the fingerprints by wiping the scene with cloth before leaving. At about 4 o'clock in the morning, she fled from the back door of the museum. The monitoring showed that she observed the surrounding area for a long time to ensure that there were no patrol guards before leaving. The entire process took about 3 hours and was very professional.
French police later confirmed that they did not interfere temporarily, but that they investigated the museum’s security arrangements at least a week in advance, including closing hours, guard patrol routes and weaknesses in the cabin.
After committing the crime, the suspect quickly fled France. On the afternoon of September 16, she took the high-speed train from Paris to Madrid, Spain, and then transferred to Barcelona. Police issued a European arrest warrant through Interpol, accusing her of crossing the border with stolen property.
On September 30, she was arrested during security at Barcelona airport. At that time, she was preparing to board a flight to Shanghai, China, with about 1kg of molten gold nugget fragments hidden in her hand luggage. The nuggets have been partially deformed by heating and covered with a layer of black oxide in an attempt to disguise themselves as industrial waste. The Barcelona Procuratorate confirmed that these molten gold fragments matched the alloy composition of the stolen gold nuggets from the museum: about 85% gold content, 15% silver, and trace copper and iron impurities, which are typical characteristics of natural gold.
In addition to the 1 kilogram of gold nuggets she carried with her, the remaining 5 kilograms of gold nuggets are missing.Police suspect that some have been smelted and sold through the dark web. Interpol has issued an alert to Asian customs to monitor gold nugget smuggling channels. Some experts believe that the gold nuggets may have entered the black market in the Middle East or Southeast Asia and will double in value.
Police suspect she is not a single man, but a member of a theft network.French art crime experts pointed out that in recent years, most of the thefts in European museums have been related to international criminal gangs, especially "commodity theft" against precious metals. Thieves often smelt cultural relics and sell them on the black market.
According to French law, organized theft can be sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in prison.
Source: Orange Persimmon Interactive,"Youchuo" public account