France charges Chinese national over €1.5 million gold theft

The heist at the Natural History Museum in Paris marks another incident in a rising trend of high-profile burglaries in Europe

A Chinese national has been charged over a €1.5 million gold heist last month at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, Franceinfo reported on Tuesday, citing the prosecutor’s office.

The disappearance of nearly 6kg of gold was discovered by museum staff on the morning of September 16. The nuggets had been part of a permanent exhibit.

According to prosecutors, the stolen items included Bolivian nuggets donated to the Academy of Sciences in the 18th century, pieces from Russia’s Ural region gifted by Tsar Nicholas I in 1833, and nuggets from California dating back to the gold rush. Among them was a single gold nugget weighing over 5kg, found in Australia in 1990.

Police found signs of forced entry at two doors, each cut with an angle grinder, leaving openings slightly larger than an A4 sheet of paper. Security footage showed a small woman dressed in black slipping through one of the holes shortly after 1am.

The suspect used a blowtorch to shatter a display case containing the nuggets before exiting the building around 4am. Investigators said she wore a hat with a face-covering veil similar to a beekeeper’s net and looked like a circus artist. Tools recovered at the scene also included a screwdriver, saws, and gas canisters.

Police tracked the suspect through phone records and determined she left France the same day, heading toward China. She was later detained at Barcelona airport, where officers seized nearly 1kg of melted gold.

The case adds to a growing list of high-profile museum thefts across Europe and beyond. Earlier this month, thieves stole Napoleonic jewelry worth an estimated €88 million ($102 million) from the Louvre. A Picasso painting valued at $650,000 disappeared en route to a Spanish museum last week. In September, a 3,000-year-old gold bracelet was stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Four pieces of historic art, including an approximately 2,500-year-old gold helmet, were also taken from the Drents Museum in the Netherlands in January.