Museum says specimens taken are worth €600,000 based on price of gold but have ‘immeasurable heritage value’
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.
