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Historic gold samples with a street value of €600,000 but priceless to scientists and researchers have been stolen from the French national natural history museum in the latest of a series of museum robberies in France.
“This has happened in a critical context for cultural establishments in France, particularly museums,” the Paris museum said. “Several public collections have been the victims of robberies in the past months.”
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, an apparently well-planned criminal operation targeted the museum’s geology and mineralogy gallery. Cleaning staff detected the break-in later that day and museum teams saw that four to six pieces of gold were missing.
The thieves are believed to have used an angle grinder and blowtorch to force their way into the riverside museum that sits on the edge of Paris’s Jardin des Plantes. It is an unprecedented theft from the high-security museum.
A museum spokesperson said thieves took “several specimens of native gold from the national collections held by the museum”. The spokesperson added: “While the stolen specimens are valued at around €600,000 based on the price of raw gold, they nevertheless carry an immeasurable heritage value. The museum laments this inestimable loss for research, heritage and for a collection accessible to the public.”
Native gold is a metal alloy containing gold and silver in their natural, unrefined form.
The museum’s director, Emmanuel Skoulios, told BFMTV: “We are dealing with an extremely professional team, perfectly aware of where they needed to go, and with professional equipment. It is absolutely not by chance that they went for these specific items. Beyond the material value, for the museum this is above all about pieces in the national collection whose historic, scientific and heritage value is incalculable.”
The museum’s mineralogy gallery remained closed on Wednesday while the organised crime unit of Paris’s judicial police led an investigation. Security was increased at the museum and staff were checking the collection for other losses.
One of the museum’s treasures, according to its website, is a native gold and quartz sample measuring 9cm by 8.5cm that originated in the Donatia mine in California and was donated by a wealthy French collector.
Earlier this month the Adrien-Dubouché National Museum in Limoges, central France, was broken into and thieves took three objects worth a total of more than €6.5m and classed as “national treasures” in France. They were two 14th- and 15th-century China porcelain plates and an 18th-century China porcelain vase.
The mayor of Limoges, Émile Roger Lombertie, told Agence France-Presse on the day the robbery was discovered: “Criminality is increasing, we always have to be one step ahead. All the great museums of the world have had pieces stolen at one time or another. It is seemingly collectors giving orders to established criminal gangs.”
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Last November, four men with axes and baseball bats smashed display cases in broad daylight at the Cognacq-Jay Museum in Paris targeting a popular exhibition, Pocket Luxury, which featured small precious objects from the 18th century. Seven valuable tobacco boxes were stolen, some of which had been on loan from the Louvre and the UK’s royal collection.
The next day, jewellery valued at several million euros was stolen in an armed robbery at around 4pm at the Hiéron Museum in Saône-et-Loire in central France.
The most notorious museum heist of recent times occurred at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in May 2010. Vjeran Tomic, nicknamed Spider-Man, made off with masterpieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Amedeo Modigliani valued at more than €100m.
The case revealed extraordinary security lapses at the museum, including that motion-detection alarms had been out of order for two months, and three guards failed to spot Tomic, who in 2017 was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
