Thursday, July 27, 2023

Part of stolen ancient coin horde recovered

And the theft ring seems to have been broken up:

Four suspects in the shocking theft of a Celtic gold coin hoard from the Celtic-Roman Museum in Manching, Bavaria, have been arrested. The bad news is one of the suspects was carrying 18 gold lumps in a plastic bag at the time of his arrest. Micro-X-ray fluorescence analysis of the composition of the nuggets found they match that of the Celtic coins. Each lump amounts to four of the coins. So yes, these rats stole a historically priceless hoard of 483 Celtic coins from 100 B.C. and melted at least 70 of them down.
It was interesting how well planned the heist was, and the various skill sets in the group.  I hope they find the rest of the coins.

5 comments:

Qualitarian said...

No names or photographs of the perps in any of the articles, which seems to confirm my suspicions.

blogger said...

Qualitarian, usually this is a give away but this time I think it might be regular Germans. One was a telecom expert, and one was an expert in explosives. Not your run of the mill gang of "Youts".

If you read the book "Unmasking the Forger" it's about an Italian guy.

- Borepatch

Old NFO said...

Grrr... lost history!

Landroll said...

Hummmm. Seems the Celts had a way of dealing with malfactors that involved a bag, a bit of rope, and a bog. Quite likely no repeat offenders and very few willing to aspire to the offenders job title.

tiredWeasel said...

There were several high profile museum thefts in Germany committed by Eastern European clans. Might be the case here, IDK, but the clans, be they eastern european or middle eastern, are right now the less classy and equally violent German version of the Cosa Nostra.

The police is understaffed, overworked and may be hampered by politics, politicians and politically connected DAs so most cases go more or less unsolved fpor years to decades or they find some perpetrators but not the art or artefacts that got stolen.