Four Germans have been arrested in connection with the audacious theft of a rarelot of Celtic gold coins from a Bavarian museum in November 2022, some of which were likely melted down, authorities said on July 20.
The men, aged 42 to 50, and with a long suspected history of burglars, were arrested the day before following searches at their homes in Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in northeastern Germany, authorities said at a press conference in Munich.
The coins and pure gold stolen from the Manching Museum were the greatest Celtic gold find of the 20th century. Some pieces, found in 1999, can be dated to around 100 years BC. The entire treasure, whose market value is estimated at some 1.6 million euros, has not yet been found and “the search is continuing”, he added.
Part of the loot was irretrievably destroyed: 18 nuggets probably consisting of 4 melted pieces – perhaps to be more easily sold – were seized during searches, according to the authorities. About 70 pieces, out of a total of 483, are “apparently lost forever”, lamented the Bavarian Minister of Arts, Markus Blume, who describes the theft as “an attack on our cultural memory”.
“The hope remains to discover intact parts”, he nevertheless added, hoping that the suspects will give clues. The latter, however, did not speak at this stage. They incur from 1 to 10 years in prison for “aggravated theft in an organized gang”.
The police had first looked at previous cases in German museums, including a spectacular theft of diamonds in Dresden at the end of 2019 and that of a gold coin weighing a hundred kilos in 2017 in Berlin to determine if it was the same team. A criminal gang of Lebanese origin very active in Germany, known as the “Remmo clan”, was involved in these two packages.
For the Manching museum robbery, the suspects, two of whom had criminal records, were found through DNA evidence taken by police at the scene. This is how the authorities discovered that at least three of them had also probably participated in 11 hitherto unsolved burglaries between March 2014 and September 2022, in stores and a casino in Germany and Austria.
