Feared Remmo Clan Listed as Suspects in Dutch Heist

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Dutch investigators have found out where the car used by thieves who stole four pieces of Romanian treasure, the Coțofenești Helmet and three Dacian bracelets, from the Drents Museum in the city of Assen was stolen, according to De Telegraaf. Police are also investigating a person who behaved suspiciously at the Dacia exhibition shortly before the robbery on Saturday. A man wearing a cap and a large bag was seen at the museum five days before the robbery, the Dutch publication reports.
Police have confirmed that the individual who was behaving suspiciously is now under investigation. The car in which the thieves stole the four valuable pieces from Romania’s Dacian treasure was found burned out near Rolde, 6 kilometres from Assen. The car, a Volkswagen Golf, was stolen in Alkmaar, which is almost 200 kilometres from Assen, on 23 or 24 January. The registration number was most likely stolen earlier. Police have images showing how the fire broke out. Moments later, another car can be seen stopping near the burning car. Police suspect that the perpetrators fled in that car.
So far, the police have received at least 60 tips about the robbery. A team of 20 to 35 police officers is working on the case. Both the Dutch and Romanian police do not rule out that foreign criminals were behind the robbery and that it was a very well-targeted robbery, notes De Telegraaf.
Investigators do not rule out the possibility that the thieves are Romanian, but they are also targeting the infamous Remmo clan, an organized crime group of Lebanese-Kurdish origin that has committed several spectacular art robberies in Germany in recent years. Police are examining surveillance camera footage and questioning museum employees.
The golden helmet from Coțofenești, dated to the 5th-4th centuries BC, as well as three Dacian gold bracelets from Sarmizegetusa Regia, from the second half of the 1st century BC, some of the most important artifacts in Romania’s national heritage, were stolen on Saturday from the Drents Museum in Assen, the Netherlands.
The Remmo clan involved in the “Heist of the Century” and other spectacular crimes
Investigators do not rule out the possibility that the thieves are Romanian, but they are also targeting the notorious Remmo clan, an organized crime group of Lebanese-Kurdish origin that has committed several spectacular robberies in Germany in recent years.
The Remmo family belongs to an Arab ethnic group called Mhallami, originally from Anatolia. Members of this ethnic group began to emigrate in the 1930s for economic reasons, first to Lebanon, where they were accepted only as stateless people and lived on the margins of society. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1970), parts of the Remmo family emigrated to East Germany, settling in Berlin, according to DW.
The extended group is made up of 13 individual families, which would have between 500 and 1,000 members, according to 2020 estimates by German authorities. They suspect the clan of crimes such as extortion, pimping, robberies, drug trafficking, money laundering, concealment, illegal possession, arms trafficking and murder.

Spectacular robbery at a bank in Berlin

In October 2014, a member of the Remmo clan, along with several accomplices, broke into a Sparkasse bank branch in Berlin. To eliminate any potential evidence of the heist, the criminals set fire to the branch.

However, this caused an explosion, injuring the clan member and allowing his DNA traces to be identified at the crime scene. Wanted internationally with an arrest warrant, the man was arrested in Rome in January 2015 and handed over to German authorities.

That same year, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. Since December 2017, he has been serving an open detention regime. Neither the accomplices involved in the robbery nor the stolen goods, valued at 9.16 million euros, have been recovered, according to the local newspaper B.Z. from Berlin.

The theft of the “Big Maple Leaf” coin

One of the most famous robberies attributed to the Remmo clan took place in March 2017 when a 100-kilogram gold coin, known as the “Big Maple Leaf,” was stolen from the Bode Museum in Berlin.

Ten years earlier, the “Big Maple Leaf” was recognized by the Guinness World Records not only as the largest gold coin in the world but also for its 99.999% gold purity. A set of five such coins was produced by the Royal Canadian Mint (RCM) in 2007 at its Ottawa facility, where the first BML coin produced remains in storage.

The stolen coin from the Berlin museum, valued at approximately 3.75 million euros, has never been recovered and is believed to have been melted down to be sold on the black market. In 2017, a prosecutor attributed over 1,000 crimes to the Remmo family, primarily burglaries and thefts, with a total damage value exceeding 28 million euros.

On February 20, 2020, the Berlin Regional Court found brothers Wissam and Ahmed Remmo guilty of theft, each receiving a sentence of four and a half years in prison. Another defendant, a former security guard who accompanied Ahmed Remmo, was sentenced to three years and four months in prison, according to Die Welt.

The Remmo Clan Involved in the “Heist of the Century”

In November 2019, members of the Remmo clan carried out another large-scale robbery, this time at the Grüne Gewölbe Museum in Dresden, the administrative capital of the Saxony region.

Numerous pieces of jewelry, adorned with over 4,000 diamonds and other precious stones, were stolen, causing an initial estimated damage of over one billion euros, according to museum representatives.

“It wasn’t just the gallery that was robbed, but all Saxons,” Michael Kretschmer, visibly upset, told reporters at the time. Grüne Gewölbe has 10 rooms displaying over 3,000 objects, ranging from jewelry to renowned masterpieces.

The German press referred to the theft as “the heist of the century,” with the damage being unprecedented for museums since the end of World War II.

To cover their tracks, the thieves set fire to an electrical distribution box in the Old Town of Dresden, as well as the car they used to flee the scene. The car was set on fire in an underground parking lot of an apartment building, causing total damages of over 1 million dollars.

In the years that followed, however, the value of the stolen goods was revalued significantly downwards, to 113 million euros. Most of the treasures were recovered in December 2022 at an address in Berlin.

In May 2023, five members of the clan were sentenced to prison terms of up to six years for this theft. Some of the jewelry was recovered following an agreement between the convicts and the authorities, but much of it still remains missing.

According to German prosecutors, the perpetrators of the robbery had previously cut the grille of a window and then reattached it to the form, in order to be able to enter the museum building and exit it as quickly as possible.

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