In January 2017 , a duo of agile brigand cut muddle in the ceiling of a London storage warehouse , rappel down shelves — steering clear of motion detector — and abscond with 16 bags of rare books deserving about $ 3.2 million . The mission take about 5 hours to nail , and by 2:15 a.m. , the perpetrators had take flight the conniption in a getaway railcar , which they bleach out unclouded before desert . The slip cache of tome include first edition works by SirIsaac Newton , Galileo , andFrancisco Goya , and an international coalition of researcher from theUK , Italy , and Romania ( plus extra assistance from European Union forces ) has spent more than three year judge to recover it . Now , they at long last have .
AsThe Guardianreports , Rumanian police officers locate around 200 missing volumes all carefully wrapped and inter in an hush-hush cement pit inside a house in Neamț County , Romania . The crime was n’t an isolated incident ; the thieves are phallus of a Romanian organized crime gang linked to a number of standardised warehouseheists . According to astatementfrom London ’s Metropolitan Police , they ’ve grapple to elude seizure for so long partly because they pilfer abroad , but also because they do n’t keep evidence on them for very long ( the warehouse operatives come about their spoils on to age bracket and cursorily leave the state ) .
For this particular crime , however , they were muddy . Investigators get a line DNA on one of the fomite ’s headrests , which helped lead to the stoppage of 13 people imply in the record burglary and related crimes . That was in June 2019 ; it acquire another 15 months to track down thebooksthemselves .
“ This recovery is a double-dyed end to this surgical operation , ” London detective inspector Andy Durhamsaidin a statement . “ These book are exceedingly worthful , but more significantly they are unreplaceable and are of great importance to international ethnic inheritance . ”
[ h / tThe Guardian ]
