Police have said they remain confident of arresting four men who stole jewels worth tens of millions of euros in broad daylight at Maastricht art fair, despite a search of a Belgian river failing to yield any clues.
Belgian and Dutch police, including underwater divers, spent about three and a half hours on Monday searching a river in the Belgian city of Verviers, in an attempt to find items the robbers were thought to have ditched after the crime in June 2022.
Dutch police said they had hoped to find a scooter at the bottom of the river but this “piece of the puzzle” remained missing. In a statement, police said they were hopeful of closing the case next year.
Armed robbers in flat caps stole diamonds and other jewellery in a brazen daylight raid at the European fine art fair in Maastricht on 28 June 2022. Dramatic video footage showed the robbers threatening terrified visitors with what appeared to be handguns and using a sledgehammer to smash a jewellery case, while sirens blared.
The phrase “Peaky Blinders” trended on social media in the Netherlands after the raid because the caps worn by the robbers resembled those worn by the gangsters in the Birmingham-set TV crime drama.
In a Dutch police statement, an unnamed prosecutor described Monday’s river search, using metre-wide magnetic dredges, as one of the final parts of the investigation: “As it stands now, the investigation will be completed next year and there is good hope that the suspects can be arrested.”
Asked about the grounds for hope after the fruitless river search, a police spokesperson said: “You never give up.”
Police said an unidentified object found at the bottom of the river was taken away for further investigation, but they were not linking it to the art fair robbery “in the first instance”.
The four men, who all wore flat caps, glasses and smart blazers during the robbery, are thought to be from the Serbian town of Niš. Police think they may be hiding there or in Belgrade. Some are suspected of having committed similar robberies in Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
The suspects are thought to have stayed in Belgium before and after the robbery, in a Verviers hotel and lodgings in Liège rented via an online platform, before fleeing to Serbia, via Germany, Austria and Hungary, among other countries. The gang used two rental cars, a Kia Ceed and an Opel Astra, both of which were caught speeding in Germany. A woman pictured in one of the cars caught by speeding cameras is also a suspect in the case.
The cars were tracked down and forensically examined. Police have also investigated the role of two women involved in returning one of the hire cars to an outlet near Frankfurt airport, but have not designated them suspects.
Police initially arrested two Belgian men but later released them without charge, having concluded they played no role in the crime.
Police say the total value of “the loot” is worth tens of millions of euros. Two diamonds have been recovered – one, which was part of a necklace, was found in Israel; a second was traced to Hong Kong.
An investigation agency for the jeweller’s insurance company, Charles Taylor Adjusting, has previously offered a reward of half a million pounds. The jewels were stolen from the Bond Street jeweller Symbolic & Chase, which, according to its Instagram feed, was displaying diamond rings and an elaborate Japanese-style white gold bracelet.
The Limburg public prosecutor’s office in the Netherlands has also offered €20,000 (£16,730) to anyone who can provide information or clues that lead to the identification of the robbers.
