(MENAFN- AzerNews) Two paintings - a Cubist portrait by Pablo Picasso, known as
Tête, and Marc Chagall's "Man in Nature" depicting a praying man -
were stolen in February 2010 from a villa in Tel Aviv owned by the
Hercikovich family, Azernews reports, citing
foreign media.
14 years after they were stolen from a collector, the paintings
were found in the basement of the Belgian city of Antwerp.
At that time, both paintings were valued at $900,000. At the
same time, the robbers also stole jewelry worth $ 680,000 from the
safe, which was never found.
It was only at the end of 2022 that investigators achieved a
breakthrough in their decade-long search for paintings, when the
Belgian police received a tip that an art dealer was offering two
paintings for sale in Namur (Belgium).
During an undercover operation that lasted several months, police
tracked the movements of the suspect, a 68-year-old Israeli luxury
watch dealer, whom Belgian police call "Daniel Z".
After conducting a search of the suspect's house at the request
of the prosecutor, the federal police found a significant amount of
money, but the location of the paintings remained unknown.
"The checks and police measures carried out during 2023 made it
possible to establish that the suspect owned the wanted works and
that he could have kept them at his home or the house of one of his
relatives," police officers told the French–speaking Belgian daily
Le Soir. "Even though the suspect confessed to having the
paintings, he refused to say where he kept them."
Having failed to get any leads from the suspect, investigators
expanded their search to Antwerp, where they completely checked the
building, which previously housed an art dealer associated with the
theft of paintings in the past. Here they found two wooden crates
with screw-down lids, which contained the stolen works of art.
According to the police, the paintings were not damaged and were
still in their original frames. The main suspect was charged with
stealing two paintings, after which he was taken into custody.
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