Stolen Van Gogh paintings on show

AMSTERDAM: The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam welcomed home two paintings by the Dutch master yesterday, more than 14 years after they were ripped off the museum’s wall in a nighttime heist.

“They’re back,” said museum director Axel Rueger. He called their return one of the “most special days in the history of our museum.”

The paintings, the 1882 View of the Sea at Scheveningen, and 1884-85 work Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, were discovered last year by Italian police investigating suspected Italian mobsters for cocaine trafficking.

It wasn’t an easy find. The two paintings were wrapped in cotton sheets, stuffed in a box and hidden behind a wall in a toilet, said Gen Gianluigi D’Alfonso of the Italian financial police, who was on hand at the museum to watch the ceremonial unveiling.

They were found in a farmhouse near Naples as Italian police seized 20 million euros (R270m) worth of assets investigators say are linked to two drug kingpins.

“After years shrouded in darkness, they can now shine again,” Dutch Minister for Education, Culture and Science Jet Bussemaker said, as an orange screen slid away to reveal the two paintings behind a glass wall.

The artworks were taken to the museum’s conservation studio for repair, but suffered remarkably little damage, as thieves who had clambered up a ladder and smashed a window to get into the museum in 2002 ripped them out of their frames and fled.