Officials said on Wednesday that thieves who entered a museum in southern Germany and took hundreds of antique gold coins did so in nine minutes without sounding the alarm. This is another indication that the theft was the work of organized criminals.
483 Celtic coins and a lump of unworked gold that was found in 1999 during an archaeological dig close to the modern town of Manching have become the target of a worldwide manhunt by the police.
Guido Limmer, the deputy chief of the State Criminal Police Office of Bavaria, described how communications networks in the area were disrupted at 1:17 a.m. (0017 GMT) on Tuesday when cables were cut at a telecom hub less than one kilometer (less than a mile) from the Celtic and Roman Museum in Manching.
Celtic gold heist: Museum’s security systems captured how a door was forced open
According to Limmer, the museum’s security systems captured how a door was forced open at 1:26 a.m. and how the burglars left again at 1:35 a.m. The thieves must have broken open a display cabinet and removed the treasure within those nine minutes.
Limmer claimed that there were “parallels” between the theft in Manching and previous thefts of valuable jewelry from Dresden and a sizable gold coin from Berlin. Both have been attributed to a gang with roots in Berlin.
“Whether there’s a link we can’t say,” he added. “Only this much: we are in touch with colleagues to investigate all possible angles.” Markus Blume, the minister of science and the arts for Bavaria, claimed that the facts supported the use of experts.
“It’s clear that you don’t simply march into a museum and take this treasure with you,” he told public broadcaster BR. “It’s highly secured and as such there’s a suspicion that we’re rather dealing with a case of organized crime.” However, officials confessed that there had been no security on duty at the museum overnight.
According to Rupert Gebhard, director of the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection in Munich, an alarm system was assessed to offer enough security. According to Gebhard, the wealth is extremely valuable to both the Manching community and archaeologists around Europe.
The gold coins date to around 100 B.C.
The bowl-shaped coins, which were produced from Bohemian river gold and date to around 100 B.C., demonstrate the connections that the Celtic community at Manching had with other parts of Europe, according to him. The treasure is worth, according to Gebhard, roughly 1.6 million euros ($1.65 million).
“The archaeologists hope that the coins remain in their original state and reappear again at some point,” he said, adding that they are well documented and would be hard to sell.
“The worst option, the melting down, would mean a total loss for us,” he claimed. considering that at current market values, the gold’s actual material value would only amount to roughly 250,000 euros.
The scale of the cache, according to Gebhard, suggested that it might have been “the war chest of a tribal chief.” The largest such find was made in Germany during routine archaeological investigations in the 20th century, and it was discovered inside a bag buried beneath building foundations.
The theft of the coins has already been reported to Interpol and Europol, according to Limmer, the deputy police chief. A 20-person special investigative squad, code-named “Oppidum” after the Latin name for a Celtic settlement, has been established to find the thieves.