ALBAWABA - Five men are officially convicted in a jewelry theft case in the German city of Dresden in 2019. The items stolen were worth about £98m ($122,861m) from the city-state museum.
The convicts admitted in court that they broke into the Green Vault museum in November 2019, smashing jewelry glass cases with an axe jamming everything they could possibly steal into a sack they brought with them to the crime scene.
They added that they brought a fire extinguisher with them to erase any DNA traces that could possibly lead the police to them.
Throughout their planning to execute the burglary, they visited the site on multiple occasions. They also planned their escape in a car they left in a parking lot, where they set it on fire before leaving for Berlin.
"Art can be money. But you cannot sell it; once it's in the criminal underworld, it stays there," one of them told CBS News.
The police recovered some of the jewels including a diamond-encrusted sword. However, it is feared that some of the stolen pieces are lost forever.
The stolen pieces include a brooch that belonged to Queen Amalie Auguste of Saxony, a diamond-encrusted hilt and a shoulder piece which contains the famous 49-carat Dresden white diamond.
The burglars are members of a so-called Remmo clan, a notorious criminal family network, known for ties to organized crime in Germany.
