AFP, PARIS
Six Georgians have been sentenced to up to seven years’ jail in France over the theft of rare editions of Russian literary classics, including by 19th-century luminary Alexander Pushkin, from prestigious French libraries.The trial is the latest case seeking justice for a spate of similar heists over the past few years from libraries across Europe, suspected to be the work of an organized network with potential links to Russia.The thieves made away with rare Russian classics worth millions in total, including by 19th-century literary greats Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Lermontov.
A paper sculpture of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in a bookstore in St Petersburg, Russia, is pictured on Tuesday.
The six defendants — five men and a woman — were all found guilty overnight Friday to yesterday of criminal conspiracy with intent to commit an offense, while some were rapped for the theft of a cultural asset on display.Two were sentenced in absentia, as they had already been arrested in Georgia, which does not extradite its citizens.
Another pair — identified only as Mikheil Z and Beqa T — have already been convicted and imprisoned in other countries for similar crimes and have been temporarily handed over to France.Mikheil was handed the heaviest punishment of seven years in jail and a ban on ever setting foot on French soil once released and deported. He had already been sentenced last year in Lithuania to three years and four months in prison for the organized theft of 19th-century publications valued at 606,000 euros (US$701,020).Beqa copped a four-year sentence, on top of the three years and six months in prison he had already been handed in Estonia.The prosecutor said the six defendants’ theft had been “massive, organized, planned and executed with meticulousness and cynicism.The thefts spurred the creation of an EU police, Europol and Eurojust joint investigation team that led to several arrests in 2024.The crimes in France took place in 2023 at the Diderot Library of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon, and at the National Library of France (BnF) and the University Library of Languages and Civilizations in Paris.The thieves went to the libraries to consult rare and valuable works, photographing and measuring them, and returned later to replace them with virtually undetectable copies, investigators said.Between March and October 2023, Mikheil went to the BnF 40 times to request access to manuscripts, mainly by Pushkin, claiming he was doing research on democracy in 19th-century Russian literature.In November, the library realized nine works had been replaced with copies, with an estimated loss of 650,000 euros.In June 2024, Russia’s Litfond auction house listed in its catalogue a second edition of Pushkin’s The Prisoner of the Caucasus, a book corresponding to a copy stolen from the BnF.The auction house told French authorities it had documentation proving the book was acquired from its owner in Russia in 2014 to 2015.In the eyes of the investigating magistrates, the thefts might be linked to a desire to repatriate Russia’s cultural heritage at a time when Moscow’s relations with Europe have been increasingly strained over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
