French gendarmes recover 6 Picasso prints and arrest 7 men
The prints were found intact in an apartment on 3 November, after their theft from a restaurant in Mougins on 1 October. The suspects were placed in police custody.
Loading… Բեռնվում է…
The prints were found intact in an apartment on 3 November, after their theft from a restaurant in Mougins on 1 October. The suspects were placed in police custody.
French gendarmes recovered 6 stolen original Pablo Picasso prints from an apartment on the French Riviera on 3 November and arrested 7 men. The works had been taken from L’Amandier restaurant in Mougins on 1 October.
About 40 gendarmes searched 2 apartments after weeks of surveillance and wiretapping. The prints were stacked intact in a bedroom behind clothes and toolboxes, Le Monde said. The gendarmerie announced on 4 November that the works had been returned.
Surveillance footage showed 2 masked and gloved men entering the restaurant through a French door, taking down the prints and fleeing in less than a minute. A third person acted as a lookout in a nearby vehicle. Restaurant owner Matthieu Autant discovered the theft the following morning and alerted authorities.
The Grasse prosecutor’s office opened an investigation and assigned it to the Cannes research brigade. Investigators used surveillance footage and telephone data as well as monitoring and physical surveillance to trace the suspects.
The 7 men, aged 18 to 30, were arrested on 3 November in the Alpes-Maritimes and placed in police custody. Investigators identified 3 as suspected direct participants in the burglary and 4 as suspected of helping with logistics or handling stolen goods.
Lieutenant Colonel Guillaume Plaidy, commander of the Cannes gendarmerie, said investigators had to act quickly because the works risked being resold and disappearing from the art market. He also said the works were difficult to sell and the suspects lacked the know-how to find a buyer and were better known for drug and weapons offenses, ARTnews said, citing his comments to Le Monde.
The prints belong to Autant’s collection, which they joined in the early 2000s. They are part of a series of 100 engravings Picasso made in the early 1930s; the loss from the theft was estimated at more than €100,000. Picasso lived in Mougins from 1961 until his death in 1973.
Following the recovery, Autant said the restaurant might have to rethink its security arrangements.
The integration lets creators publish music from ElevenLabs to SoundCloud without downloading and uploading it first; tracks sent that way will be identified by their superintelligence (SI) origin.
1 min
Sony raised its gaming sales and profit forecasts by 6% each as PlayStation recorded 127 million active accounts in September.
3 min
The broadcaster has also removed past UK, American, Australian and New Zealand editions from its streaming platform and canceled the planned spin-off Second Married at First Sight.
3 min