PARIS —
Eight men go on trial in
Paris on Wednesday accused of stealing a Banksy
artwork, painted on the door of the Bataclan concert venue to honor 90 people
killed in the 2015 terror attacks.
اضافة اعلان
The seven French
defendants and one Italian are suspected of removing the metal door from the
building before dawn in January 2019 and transporting it to Italy.
It was decorated
in 2018 with the stencil of a mournful young woman by the anonymous
British street artist, giving it an estimated value of up to one million euros.
A white van with
concealed number plates was seen stopping on January 26, 2019 in an alleyway running
alongside the Bataclan in central Paris.
Many
concertgoers fled via the same alley after the Bataclan became the focal point
of France’s worst ever attacks since World War II, when
Daesh extremists in
November 2015 killed 130 people at a string of sites across the capital.
Three of those
on trial, in their 30s, confessed to the theft when they were arrested, though
two said they were only carrying out the orders of the third, Mehdi Meftah.
Meftah, 41, who
founded a luxury brand of T-shirts embellished with 18-karat gold bars after
claiming to win 7.5 million euros in the lottery, told police that his friend
Kevin G., also on trial, presented him with the Banksy unannounced.
This version was
confirmed by Kevin but contested by other defendants.
Four defendants,
aged between 31 and 58, are accused of transporting the stolen artwork.
Generators and
grinders
On the morning of the theft, three masked men climbed out of the van,
cut the hinges with angle grinders powered by a generator and left within 10
minutes, in what an investigating judge called a “meticulously prepared” heist.
A burglary of a
generator and angle grinders from a DIY shop in France’s south-eastern Isere
region 12 days earlier put police on the trail of three of the suspects, who
were recorded talking about the art theft when their phones were tapped.
Phone records
showed that the men were in Paris on the night of the heist.
Investigators
pieced together the door’s route across France and into
Italy, where it was
found in June 2020 on a farm in Sant’Omero, near the Adriatic coast.
“The symbolism
(of the theft) is what it is, and no one is trying to play it down,” said
Margaux Durand-Poincloux, one of the defence lawyers.
“But in my
client’s case, it remains an aggravated theft in which he did not decide the
target,” she added.
In a separate
court case, the city-owned operator of the concert hall is fighting the return
of the Banksy-decorated door to the owners of the building.
Works by the
street artist, often bearing a political message, have fetched millions of
dollars at auction.
The sole surviving 2015 attacker, Salah Abdeslam, is facing a life term in prison at a marathon trial,
which opened in Paris last September, with prosecutors set to make final
arguments and sentencing requests this week.
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