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BucharestRomanian prosecutors said on Friday they had recovered around 200 stolen centuries-old books that disappeared from storage in Britain in 2017, including works by Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Dante Aligheri.
The first editions of Galileo and Newton, a text by Italian scholar Petrarca, rare versions of Dante, and 80 sketches by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya were stolen in January 2017 from a warehouse in Feltham, near London.
The thieves lowered themselves to the ground 12 meters (40 feet) after entering through the roof, dodging motion sensors to spend hours browsing thousands of works destined for auction in the United States.
They went the same route with loot whose total value was estimated at about two million euros ($ 2.4 million).
Police arrested four Romanian suspects in June 2019 when they raided around 30 properties in the northeast of the country, while 10 others, whose nationalities were not disclosed, were arrested in Britain.
But the EU agency Eurojust said that the arrest in Turin in January of the alleged leader – also Romanian – who cooperated with authorities was “decisive” in recovering the works.
The loot from the thieves was discovered in a house in Neamt County, in northeastern Romania, prosecutors said.
The London Metropolitan Police said in a statement that the “irreplaceable” works had been “buried underground”, posting an image on their website of a hidden compartment under a house.
They had been stolen by an organized crime group that “brings members to the UK to commit specific crimes and then takes them out of the country shortly after,” the Met said.
He is “linked to a number of prominent Romanian crime families that are part of the Clamparu criminal group” with “a history of large-scale and complex high-value robberies,” the statement added.
“This operation is a double success for law enforcement agencies who tracked down the suspects and recovered the stolen treasures before they went on sale,” Eurojust said.AFP
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