Italian police recover stolen paintings worth over $10m

Italian police have recovered three paintings worth more than $10 million that were stolen several months ago.

The chief of police in Parma, Andrea Pagliaro, told the AFP news agency on Friday that nine Moldovans were being investigated in connection with the theft, and that five of them were believed to have carried out the burglary.

The artworks were taken from the Fondazione Magnani Rocca museum near the northern city of Parma in late March in an operation that lasted less than three minutes. Italy’s domestic police force, the Carabinieri, and its cultural heritage protection unit announced in a statement on Friday that the paintings by Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse had been retrieved from an apartment in Parma.

The paintings are more than a century old and police suspect an organised gang was behind the theft.

The heist, footage of which police released on Friday, happened on March 22. In the video, two masked burglars can be seen entering the museum through a window and taking the paintings off the wall before handing the artworks to an accomplice waiting outside. An alarm was triggered during the robbery.

Separately, authorities in Brazil said late on Thursday that they have recovered artworks by one of the same artists, Matisse. The paintings, estimated to be worth around $200,000, have now been returned to the library they were stolen from in December.

The paintings were discovered at a property in Sao Bernardo do Campo, where a man was arrested.