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Friday, March 29, 2024

Two held after 221lb gold coin stolen from Berlin museum

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Special police units have raided several homes in Berlin in connection with the brazen heist of a 221lb gold coin from one of the city’s most famous museums. Police arrested at least two suspects during early morning raids in the city’s Neukoelln neighbourhood.

“We assume that the two suspects match the ones seen on the video footage from surveillance cameras” during the burglary, police spokesman Winfrid Wenzel said. He added that searches of the apartments were continuing, but the coin had not been found. The Canadian Big Maple Leaf coin, worth several million pounds, was stolen from the Bode Museum in March.

At least two burglars broke into the museum at night, using a ladder to climb to a window from elevated railway tracks. They grabbed the coin, loaded it on to a wheelbarrow and carted it out of the building and along the tracks across the Spree river before descending into a park on a rope and fleeing in a getaway car.

Police say the coin – with a diameter of 20.9in and 1.2in thick, has a face value of a million Canadian dollars (£600,000). By weight alone, however, it would be worth almost €3.92m at market prices. The coin is likely to have been damaged in the theft.

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