Worldcrunch
Abderrahmane Ouatiki, an Algerian student working at the hotel front desk, was taken hostage and forced to lead the robbers to their priceless loot. As the trial for the 2016 robbery unfolds in the French capital, Le Figaro revisits how everything fell apart for the PhD candidate, who lost his passion for studying and was forced to return to his home country.
Between 1880 and 1930, there was a significant rise in thefts in department stores, mostly committed by women from the middle and upper classes. This situation brought with it the establishment of a new pathology: kleptomania. A century later, feminist historians have given new meaning to the practice as a protest against the social structures and oppressions of capitalism and patriarchy.
Eric Piedoie, a French master forger known as “the art pirate,” has died after being mugged in Cannes over his luxury watch — which (like his own work) was a fake. French daily Le Parisien highlighted the irony, calling his death Sunday from heart failure after the attack “one last snub” from a man who […]
Churches are besieged by a specific type of thief — those hired by art collectors to steal specific pieces. The intrinsic loss caused by these actions is often irreparable, but church communities in Germany are starting to fight back.
NANTERRE — He’s got Palmyra on his mind. Sitting as his desk in the judicial police office in Nanterre, near Paris, Ludovic Ehrhart is staring at his holiday pictures: four black-and-white snapshots of the ancient Syrian city. He put them up last summer, just after ISIS started to destroy it. He’s been to Palmyra twice, […]
PARIS — France’s intelligence services no longer rule out what not so long ago seemed unthinkable: the emergence on its territory of a “Lebanon-like” terrorism which would see suicide bombs replaced one day by the deadliest of operational modes — truck or car bombings, possibly activated remotely. “We have to accept the reality,” a well-informed […]
KERMANSHAH — It looks like a bank heist that took a very bad turn. Police of the Kermanshah province in western Iran suspect that a unidentified man’s body found in a bank ventilation shaft belonged to a would-be thief who suffocated there overnight. Employees of a branch of the Bank Saderat (the Exports Bank) called […]
Odd and cruel episodes from police blotters around the world…
A Spanish pianist faces seven years of prison…for practicing; Italian thieves clean up; An Argentine doctor’s zealous anti-abortion move; and more from the week in global crime.
Bad guys and the cops who chase them… from Russia and Mexico, to Belgium and Australia. Freeze!
A workplace murder in China’s Forbidden City, farmyard horrors in northern Italy and a lucky smartphone in Florida are among the crimes that made it on this week’s global police blotter. photo credit: alvaro-qc
In Russia, bribes taste good; In Itay, undertakers are on the take; French panty thief and endangered turtle smuggling … and other global crimes that made headlines this week.
Shiva was not like the other detainees in the Argentina prison. For one thing, this convicted kidnapper was studying to be a lawyer — which turned out to be the ticket for his daring escape.
Step inside the diamond market in Surat, where billions worth of the precious stone circulate every month. There are serious concerns about both security and origins.
FRANCE 24, LE PARISIEN (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – A day after armed men pulled off a spectacular 50 million euro diamond heist at Brussels Airport, two men made off with 3 million euros worth of diamonds after holding up a popular department store in central Paris on Tuesday night. The heist happened in broad daylight […]
DIE WELT (Germany) Worldcrunch BERLIN – The German Police has launched a special investigation codenamed “Tunnel” in the search for the perpetrators of a spectacular break-in at a Berlin bank. According to Die Welt, the thieves dug 100-foot long tunnel from a neighboring underground garage into the safety deposit box vault of the Volksbank in […]