Any old iron? This sculpture by Eduardo Chillida, worth 800,000 euros, was offered to a scrapyard Spanish police have recovered stolen art worth millions of euros after one of the thieves tried to sell a sculpture to a scrap dealer.
Thirty-five works by Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Chillida and others were stolen from a warehouse in a Madrid suburb on 27 November.
Police were tipped off that Chillida’s bench-like ‘Topos IV’, worth 800,000 euros (£675,000), had been offered to a scrapyard for 30 euros (£25).
The haul was found in a nearby suburb.
When the heist happened last month, the art works had just been brought back from an exhibition in Germany and were all still in the truck in a warehouse in Getafe, a suburb of Madrid.
Thieves broke into the warehouse and drove off with the lorry-load of art, with a combined value thought to be more than 5m euros (£4.2m).
At the time, detectives said the robbery looked like “an inside job”.
But given the discovery of the haul just a few miles away, and the attempt to offload a sculpture for scrap, a police spokesman said “it now appears more likely that we are dealing with amateurs”.
No arrests have been made yet in connection with the heist.
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