As the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, investigates the theft of jewels from the era of Emperor Napoleon, this time a Chinese woman in her 20s was caught after stealing gold bullion from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and trying to flee.
According to AFP and other foreign media, the Paris prosecutor's office said on the 21st that on the 13th of last month (local time) it had preliminarily charged a 24-year-old Chinese woman with organized theft and criminal conspiracy.
The woman is suspected of breaking into the National Museum of Natural History in Paris in the early morning of the 16th of last month and stealing about 6 kilograms of gold nuggets. It was reported that a museum cleaning worker noticed the theft after finding debris on the exhibition room floor that morning.
The investigation found that two museum doors had been cut with a circular saw, and that in the mineralogy gallery a display case containing gold bullion had been damaged with a cutter. According to prosecutors, surveillance camera footage captured a person forcing entry into the museum at around 1 a.m. on the day of the theft and leaving at around 4 a.m. At the scene, a screwdriver, a saw, a torch, and three gas canisters used to power the torch were found.
The stolen artifacts are four items in total: a Bolivian gold nugget donated to the French Academy of Sciences in the 18th century; a Ural Mountains gold nugget donated to the museum in 1833 by Russian Tsar Nikolai I; one found in California during the late 19th-century Gold Rush; and a gold nugget weighing more than 5 kilograms found in Australia in 1990.
Prosecutors estimated the damage at about 1.5 million euros (about 2.4 billion won). These stolen items, which are natural gold nuggets, are known to be more valuable than ordinary gold bullion.
The woman reportedly tried to leave France on the day of the crime and return to China. Prosecutors said they learned this by tracking call records and immediately activated judicial cooperation within Europe, after which Spanish authorities arrested the woman in Barcelona on the 30th of last month and extradited her to France.
Authorities said they are currently investigating to track the whereabouts of the stolen items and to find accomplices. The museum director said it was a "theft carried out by a highly professional team."