Three arrested in $1.2B German museum heist after 1,600 cops raid area
It was bracelets for these jewel thieves.
Three members of a crime syndicate were arrested for the museum heist of nearly $2.8 billion in 18th-century jewels following a sweeping raid in Germany on Tuesday, but two of their accessories — and the cache of missing gems — remain in the wind.
A team of some 1,600 cops from federal special police forces and local agencies hit 18 locations in the sweep, focusing on Berlin’s Neukolln district and 10 apartments, garages and vehicles.
They collared three German citizens in connection with the dramatic Dresden museum robbery from November 2019 — but failed to find two 21-year-old members of an organized crime family named as suspects.
They also failed to find any of the reportedly uninsured gems that had once belonged to Saxon ruler August the Strong and were snatched from the Green Vault inside a museum within Dresden’s Royal Palace.
“Of course we hope that the jewelry sets will be found and that they soon be able to be returned to their original location,” said the director of Dresden’s museums, Marion Ackermann, hailing the arrests as an encouraging development.
However, Dresden police spokesman Thomas Geithner admitted, “We’d have to have a lot of luck in order to find them a year after the crime.”
Ackermann previously refused to put a value on the stolen items, calling them “priceless,” but sources told Bild it was worth at least $1.2 billion. One of its best-known treasures — the 41-carat Dresden “Green Diamond” — was out on loan at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time of the break-in, which was caught on surveillance footage.
The three arrested were identified only as German citizens, two 23-year-olds and one 26. They are due before an investigating judge later Tuesday.
Prosecutors said they were tied to the “Remmo clan,” a so-called “Lebanese mafia” family whose members earlier this year were jailed over the 2017 theft in Berlin of the “Big Maple Leaf,” a 220-pound coin, which is the second-largest in the world and has never been recovered.
Two family members — Abdul Majed Remmo and Mohamed Remmo, both 21 — were named as suspects in the Dresden heist but were not located during Tuesday’s raids.
All five are accused of “serious gang robbery and two counts of arson,” Dresden prosecutors said, according to Agence France-Presse.
Berlin’s top security official, Andreas Geisel, said the raids should serve as a warning to organized crime.
“Nobody should believe that he set himself above the rules of the state,” Geisel said.
A $593,000 reward was previously offered for info on the crooks, but it was not clear if that had led to the info sparking Tuesday’s raids.
The heist had been caught in dramatic surveillance footage that showed them breaking into the museum with an ax after cutting the local power supply.
Police responded within five minutes — but the crooks had already fled.
Bild said the robbers first drove off in an Audi, which was then abandoned and torched — switching to a Mercedes that had been painted to look like a taxi.
Their loot included a sword whose hilt is encrusted with nine large and 770 smaller diamonds, and a shoulder piece that contains the famous 49-carat Dresden white diamond, Dresden’s Royal Palace had said.
The collection was brought together in the 18th century by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and later King of Poland, who commissioned and collected flashy jewelry as part of his rivalry with France’s King Louis XIV.
The treasures of the Green Vault survived Allied bombing raids in World War II, only to be carted off as war booty by the Soviet Union. They were returned to Dresden in 1958.
With Post wires