STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Thieves who stole Renoir and Rembrandt paintings in an audacious Christmas in Sweden have been sentenced to up to six years in prison and ordered to pay $30 million.
Eight men were sentenced on Friday for their parts in the theft of three pieces of art from Stockholm's waterfront National Museum on December 22. The district court found that two of the men, 42-year-old Alexander Petrov and 31-year-old Stefan Nordstroem, had been directly involved and sentenced them to six-and-a-half years and six years, respectively, for aggravated robbery. Three others, including a Moroccan, faced between two and four years in prison for complicity in the theft. The five also were ordered to pay the museum 320 million kronor ($30 million) in damages -- the estimated value of the two paintings that remain missing -- a Rembrandt self-portrait painted in 1630 and Renoir's "Young Parisian." Three other men also were sentenced to up to four years in prison for handling stolen goods, while five other suspects were acquitted of charges including theft and extortion. All 13 suspects had pleaded not guilty.
Drugs raid
Chief prosecutor Nils-Eric Schultz was quoted by The Associated Press as telling Swedish news agency TT: "I am satisfied with the verdicts and the penalties." The theft occurred when three hooded men walked into the building shortly before closing time, with one of them pointing a gun at unarmed guards while the two others snatched the art off the walls. The three then fled on foot to a boat moored across the street. The third stolen painting, Renoir's "Conversation" -- a close-up of a man and a woman with her back turned -- was found last April during an unrelated drugs raid by police and has been returned to the museum. http://europe.cnn.com/
Egyptian stolen sculpture returned
Officials in Egypt are celebrating the return of a 3,000-year-old sculpture of an Egyptian queen which was smuggled to Britain almost a decade ago. The life-sized stone head -- believed to depict Queen Nefertari, the principal wife of Pharaoh Ramses II -- was returned along with six pieces of papyrus scrolls from the later Greco-Roman period. The sculpture was stolen in 1992 from its storage place in Sakkara, a village 25km south of Cairo, in what officials described as one of the country's biggest antiquities smuggling case.
In 1995, a joint British and Egyptian investigation broke the smuggling ring and arrested fifteen people.
From the newsroom of the BBC World Service
Vandalism and neglect are 'ruining cave art'
FROM MICHAEL DYNES IN JOHANNESBURG AFRICA’S heritage of ancient cave paintings, some dating back 40,000 years, is being destroyed by vandalism and official indifference, according to the most comprehensive survey of primitive art on the continent yet published. Armed bandits in North Africa regularly use the rock paintings for target practice, while tourists in southern Africa have been caught splashing soft drinks or urinating on the fragile images to enhance them for photographs, David Coulson, author of African Rock Art, said.
Mr Coulson, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, spent six years visiting 15 African countries collecting more than 30,000 photographs and witnessed the damage being done. He has appealed for a continent-wide initiative to help to preserve the legacy. Cave paintings are dotted all over the continent from a life-size engraving of a giraffe on a sandstone slab in the Sahara to the matchstick men images of Bushmen hunter-gathers chasing wild game in South Africa’s Drakensberg mountain range. There are thought to be about two million in South Africa alone. For decades they have been dismissed as an “ethnic sideshow” or the “idle doodlings of primitive man”, he said. That has allowed a culture of popular indifference, and even official negligence, to grow up. Mr Coulson, whose research was funded partly by the American Getty Conservation Institute, said that local people have been known to chip off flakes of the paint for magical or medicinal purposes, while tourists frequently carved graffiti on cave walls, damaging works of art that than can be impaired simply by touching them.
More worrying are traders who carve out whole panels from the rock, selling them to art dealers in Europe and America. Mr Coulson said: “It would happen less if there was an awareness of the importance of the art, some of which could stand in any gallery.” The Bushmen, or San, who were largely responsible for southern Africa’s cave paintings, were regarded as “sub-human” during the 19th century and hunted by white colonists. An increasing interest in primitive cultures, however, has created a new category of tourists, who are flocking to South Africa to see the images. Some former game lodges have abandoned traditional game drives for rock art tours. Although the South African Government is starting to protect sites, “most African governments do not have the money to preserve their cultural heritage”, Mr Coulson said. The rock paintings are some of the earliest communications made by mankind, he said. “Archaeology may tell you how they lived. But rock art gives you an opportunity to see into their minds.”
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/