A woman of Chinese nationality has been charged and imprisoned in France, after her surrender by the Spanish authorities who arrested her in Barcelona on September 30, for the theft of nearly 6 kilos of gold from the collections of the Natural History Museum in Paris last month.
The Paris Prosecutor’s Office indicated this Tuesday in a statement that the indictment of this 25-year-old woman by an investigating judge of the Paris Court was formalized on October 13 and that another magistrate then ordered her imprisonment.
He is accused of organized gang robbery of some gold nuggets that were stolen from the Natural History Museum of the French capital on the night of September 15 to 16, with financial damage estimated at 1.5 million euros.
In the loot there was a nugget originally from Bolivia that had been in French public collections since the 18th century; another from the Urals given by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia in 1833; another from California extracted during the gold rush of the second half of the 19th century; a piece of quartz with a large gold content discovered in Guyana in 1883; and a gold nugget weighing more than 5 kilos found in Australia in 1990.
The Prosecutor’s Office explained that the investigators had verified that two doors of the museum had been fractured with a cutting disc and that in the mineralogy gallery the display case in which the nuggets were stored was opened with a blowtorch that was found at the scene of the robbery.
Video surveillance images showed that it was a single person who entered the Natural History Museum at 1 a.m. on September 16 and left around 4 a.m.
Tracking her phone made it possible to determine that that same day the suspect left France with the intention of fleeing to China. At the time of being captured in Barcelona, in execution of a French European warrant against her, she tried to get rid of about a kilo of melted gold.
The investigation is now trying to determine where that gold had come from, determine what happened to everything stolen and also if there were any accomplices.