Five Men Convicted Of Audacious 2019 Dresden Jewel Heist
Five men have been found guilty of an audacious jewel heist in the German city of Dresden.
The thieves stole precious items worth €113m, £98m, from the city’s state museum in 2019.
Police recovered many of the jewels, including a diamond encrusted sword, but it’s feared the rest of the looted treasure may never be found.
The men, all members of a notorious criminal family network, face sentences of four to six years.
“This was a meticulously planned heist.” The gang, who lived in Berlin, visited the site several times and prepared their entry point in advance, using a hydraulic cutting machine to saw through the bars of a protective window covering before taping them back into place.
Then, in the early hours of the morning of 25 November 2019, “they set fire to a circuit breaker panel near the museum, plunging the surrounding streets into darkness while two of the men slipped inside.”
CCTV footage captured the thieves wearing masks and wielding axes as they entered the sumptuously decorated Gruenes Gewoelbe – or Green Vault – and smashed the glass display cases to get to the treasure.
“The thieves then sprayed a foam fire extinguisher over the room to cover their tracks before making their getaway in an Audi which they then dumped in a car park, setting fire to the vehicle before they fled back to Berlin.”
After a year-long investigation, police made their first arrests. All of those convicted today are members of the so called “Remmo clan.” There are several “clans” in Germany; family networks with Arab roots responsible for major organised crime, including in recent years a raid on a department store and a bank robbery.
One of the Dresden thieves was previously convicted of the theft of a giant gold coin, which weighed 100kg, 220lbs, from Berlin’s Bode museum in 2017. The coin was never recovered and is believed to have been broken up or melted down.
“There are people who steal artworks out of passion for art, but this was really the opposite,” says Marion Ackermann, general director of Dresden’s State Art Collections. “They had no idea of what they had taken.”
Initially, there were fears that, like the golden coin, the treasure was lost forever.
But many of the stolen items were returned to the museum after three of the men confessed to the theft and agreed to divulge the location of the loot in return for lighter sentences as part of a deal with prosecutors.
Nevertheless, several pieces are still missing, including a very rare diamond called the White Stone of Saxony.
CN/Shakirat Sadiq
