Thieves snatch huge coin worth £4m from Berlin museum in dead of night
THIEVES got clean away with a unique 100kg gold coin, worth almost €4 million, from Berlin’s Bode Museum yesterday.
The coin, nicknamed the Big Maple Leaf ”, is a commemorative piece which was issued by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2007. It measures 53cm across and is 3cm thick and, like all Canadian coins, it features the Queen’s portrait.
Bode Museum gave the face value of the coin at €920,000, though the market price of 100kg of gold is much higher at €3.7 million (£3.2 million).
The coin has also entered the Guinness World Records for its purity, at 999.99/1000 gold.
German police said the thieves probably used a ladder, found abandoned at a nearby rail track, to break into the museum at around 3.30am.
However, investigators have not yet revealed how the burglars managed to avoid setting off the museum’s alarms and leave the building unnoticed while carrying the coin, which is probably too heavy for a single person to carry.
Suburban rail traffic was interrupted as police searched the area for clues after the discovery of the ladder.
The Bode Museum is on Berlin’s Unesco-listed Museum Island and houses one of the world’s biggest coin collections.
Police spokesman Winfrid Wenzel said: “Based on the information we have so far, we believe that the thief, maybe thieves, broke open a window in the back of the museum next to the railway tracks.
“They then managed to enter the building and went to the coin exhibition. The coin was secured with bulletproof glass inside the building. That much I can say.”
The Big Maple Leaf has been on show at the museum since 2010 and was part of the Münzkabinett collection, Berlin’s most important archive of coinage, which includes more than 540,000 objects.
The holding includes 102,000 coins from ancient Greece and about 50,000 Roman coins.
However, it is understood that only the Big Maple Leaf was stolen.
When asked what the thieves could do with the coin, Mr Wenzel told German newspaper Die Welt: “Either they were hired to do it by someone who wanted to have the coin, but it’s more likely that it will be melted down.”
‘We believe that the thief, maybe thieves, broke open a window in the back of the museum next to the railway’