Art News

UK Rhino Horn Heist Highlights EU-Wide Crime Trend

LONDON (REUTERS).- Wedged between a woolly mammoth and a giraffe, Rosie the stuffed rhino may seem an unlikely target for crime. But, like the fate that threatens many of her living relatives, the 100-year-old creature has had her horn stolen in a wave of rhino horn heists that is spreading across Europe. Thieves broke into the Ipswich Museum in Essex, a southern English county, just after midnight and took off with Rosie’s horn and a black rhino skull displayed nearby. “They wrenched the horn off Rosie – it probably only took them five minutes to take it and leave. They knew exactly what they wanted, and nothing was else was taken,” Max Stocker at Ipswich Council told Reuters. Thefts of rhino horns, highly prized in the Far East for their decorative and purported medicinal purposes, have been reported by museums across Britain and Europe. Many of the thefts are the work of an organised crime group who are diversifying