The thieves looted items value greater than 113 million euros ($123m) from the Inexperienced Vault in Dresden in 2019.
A German court docket has sentenced 5 gang members to as much as six years in jail for snatching priceless 18th-century jewels from a Dresden museum in what has been dubbed the most important artwork heist in fashionable historical past.
The convicted males, who appeared relieved on Tuesday by the comparatively mild sentences, are members of the “Remmo clan”, an prolonged household principally primarily based in Berlin and identified for an internet of ties to organised crime.
The items stolen from the break-in on the Gruenes Gewoelbe (Inexperienced Vault) museum in Dresden in 2019 contained greater than 4,300 diamonds with an estimated worth of greater than 113 million euros ($123 million).
They included a breast star of the Polish Order of the White Eagle and an ornate diamond headdress. Nonetheless, police have stated a lot of the stolen jewels have been recovered.
Six German males, all of their 20s, had been charged with aggravated gang theft and critical arson.
5 members of the identical household have been handed sentences of between 4 years and 4 months and 6 years and two months. A sixth member of the family was acquitted.
The plea deal got here in for criticism, nonetheless, with the president of the Berlin prosecutors’ affiliation, Ralph Knispel, noting that the defendants had not been required to disclose their accomplices.
“The query is what message that sends” to different criminals, Knispel advised public broadcaster RBB.
Prosecutors stated the boys had sawn via a part of a window grating upfront and re-attached it to get into the constructing as rapidly as potential in the course of the heist.
The stolen Dresden assortment was assembled within the 18th century by Augustus the Sturdy, elector of Saxony and later king of Poland, who commissioned ever extra good jewelry as a part of his rivalry with France’s King Louis XIV.
The treasures survived Allied bombing raids in World Struggle II, solely to be carted off as battle booty by the Soviet Union. They have been returned to Dresden, the historic capital of the state of Saxony, in 1958.
