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.。
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.
The National Museum of Natural History in Paris is not an ordinary venue. This institution, founded in 1635, is directly managed by the French government and is affiliated to the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the Ministry of the Environment. It is France's top cultural landmark, like the Louvre. The natural specimens collected in the museum cover many fields such as geology and biology. There are more than 600,000 collections in the mineralogy exhibition hall alone.
The six kilograms of natural gold that were stolen were the core exhibits of the exhibition hall, with a market price of more than 1.5 million euros — including the 18th-century Bolivian gold specially donated to the French Academy of Sciences. Witnessing the history of trans-ocean trade during the colonial period; the Ural gold, donated by Russian Tsar Nicholas I in 1833, still retains royal imprints on the surface;
There are also gold samples from the mid-19th century California gold-heating period, as well as giant pieces of gold weighing more than 5 kilograms discovered in Australia in 1990.
Emmanuel Scurios, deputy director of the French National Museum of Natural History, stressed that the mineral structure and impurities of the gold blocks are important samples of the geological evolution of different regions of the world, which can not be restored once damaged.
The surveillance video in the early morning of September 16th restored the whole process of this "single brush" theft. The 24-year-old woman didn't break the door violently, but mixed into the tourist group before closing the museum. During the chaotic period when the staff cleared the site, she hid in the corner of the storage room of the mineralogy exhibition hall to achieve "self-locking" detention.
At 1 o'clock in the morning, she walked out of the hiding place with the tools she had hidden in advance. Earlier, the corner grinder cut the several centimeters thick steel safety door at the entrance to the exhibition hall, and the noise from the high-speed rotating sand wheel was not perceived due to the depth of the museum in the botanical garden.
After entering the exhibition hall, she ran straight to the target cabinet, removing the oxygen ethanol welded rifle from the ammunition-proof glass injection — the 3000-degree heat generated by this tool melted the cabinet locks and melted the glass edge within minutes, while the infrared sensor and the vibration alarm system equipped with the cabinet did not trigger.
The subsequent investigation found that the museum’s security systems were attacked at the time of the incident, resulting in a complete failure of surveillance and alert, a vulnerability that was not detected in the security audit in 2024.
The entire crime lasted nearly three hours. After the woman used a backpack to sub-pack the gold nuggets, she carefully wiped the fingerprints on the surfaces of angle grinders, welding torches, gas tanks and other tools with cloth, and fled from the back door of the museum at about 4 a.m. Only a small amount of metal cutting debris remained on the site, until the dawn when the cleaners arrived, the damaged exhibition cabinet and the scattered debris were found, and the administrator was.
After the French police arrived, they tracked the woman's whereabouts through surrounding road surveillance: she took a high-speed train from Paris to Madrid, Spain, in the afternoon of the crime, and then turned to Barcelona, during which she was suspected of melting some of the gold nuggets.
On September 30, an abnormality occurred at the security checkpoint at Barcelona's El Pratt Airport. When the woman was preparing to board a flight to Shanghai, when her hand luggage passed through the X-ray machine, the irregular metal blocks displayed on the screen alerted security personnel.
After checking the box, it was found that the clothes were mixed with 969 grams of melted gold fragments, covered with black oxide on the surface, apparently undergoing high-temperature treatment to try to disguise as industrial waste. After professional testing, the composition of the melted gold was perfectly matched with the stolen gold of the Paris Museum – gold content of 85% and silver of 15%, containing a small amount of copper and iron impurities, which is the typical characteristic of natural gold.
On October 13, the Spanish police, in accordance with the European arrest warrant, extradited the woman back to France.Paris prosecutor Raul Bekoo filed a lawsuit against her on the same day, charges including organized theft, gang crime, etc., if the charges are established, can face up to 15 years of imprisonment.
The prosecution's disclosure of the investigation shows that the woman was not temporarily engaged, and at least a week in advance stepped on the museum, detailing closing hours, guard patrol routes and shield protection weaknesses.
Although she is the only person arrested so far, prosecutors speculate that she may be a key coordinator of a transnational criminal network, responsible for preliminary reconnaissance, gold nugget melting processing and cross-border transfer to the Asian black market. The actual modus operandi suggests that she may have received professional training and does not rule out connections with local French or Eastern European criminal gangs.
The case exposed malaria at the European Museum once again, and a month after the incident, treasure theft at the Louvre also raised public concerns about the protection of cultural heritage.
The National Museum of Natural History in Paris has announced the launch of a comprehensive security reform, replacing the lock systems of all exhibition cabinets, upgrading network protection equipment, and increasing night patrols.It is assumed that the remaining 5 kilograms of stolen gold may have been melted into the Middle East or Southeast Asian black markets through the dark grid, with the black market value likely to double.
As of October 23, French police are still hunting other people involved in the case, and the museum has not announced the progress of the recovery of the stolen gold nuggets. From the precise crime of sneaking into the museum by a single person to the camouflage of melted gold before cross-border transfer, every detail in this case highlights the professional and international characteristics of the crime of cultural relics theft, and also rings the security system of museums around the world. alarm bell.
The source:
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