Four people have been detained in Georgia on charges of stealing rare books from European libraries. This was announced today at a briefing by the First Deputy Prosecutor General of Georgia Bakur Abuladze, UNN reports with reference to Novosti Georgia.
"The investigation established that in early 2022, Georgian citizens formed an organized criminal group to secretly seize expensive books by various authors of the 19th century for their further sale," he said.
Libraries in Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, France, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and Estonia were affected.
The criminals acted according to a pre-thought-out scheme. With fake IDs, they came to libraries, checked out classic books, replaced them with fake copies, and took the original editions with them.
Thus, in 2022-2023, the defendants stole books worth several hundred thousand euros on the black market.
As part of the criminal case, dozens of people were searched in Georgia, their homes and places where the books were sold. Large amounts of cash and hundreds of books were seized, including a nineteenth-century French book. It was stolen from the National Library of France in Paris.
The Georgian Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs conducted the investigation with the assistance of colleagues from Lithuania, France, Switzerland, as well as Europol and Eurojust.
The criminal case was initiated under the article of the Criminal Code of Georgia "theft committed by an organized group on a large scale". The punishment for this crime is imprisonment for a term of 6 to 10 years.
As previously reported by the media, the group primarily hunted for lifetime editions of Russian classics. In particular, books by Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol were stolen.
Along with the financial motive, journalists saw a political tinge in the case. In this context, they spoke of a large-scale operation to return literary relics to Russia.