The National Library of France was the victim of thefts of rare Russian books which affected other institutions in France, Switzerland, Poland and the Baltic countries, she told AFP on Wednesday.
“We were victims of theft, and we filed a complaint.
We do not comment on the facts, which are the subject of an investigation
,” a BnF spokesperson told AFP, confirming information from Le
Monde
on Wednesday and from Le
Parisien
in early January.
A complaint was filed in November.
The number of flights was not specified.
The affair was revealed in Poland in November.
In France, it has already given rise to three indictments for thefts from the university library of the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Bulac) and ENS Lyon.
Committed by Georgians according to the first elements of the investigation, the thefts target original or rare editions of great Russian writers such as Alexander Pushkin, kept in collections outside Russia.
The Arsenal Library victim
The section of the Paris public prosecutor's office responsible for organized delinquency first referred an investigation into theft committed by an organized gang to the Brigade for the Repression of Banditry (BRB).
The investigators then made a connection with similar acts committed in Lyon.
The investigations are entrusted to the Central Office for the Fight against Trafficking in Cultural Property (OCLBC).
Le Parisien
mentioned at the beginning of January the procedure followed at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, a BNF site: ask to consult these volumes, and replace them with copies made with great care.
In Poland and the Baltic countries, in two years, shelves of 19th century Russian literature were plundered in the same way from libraries, with an increasingly sophisticated modus operandi.
On Monday in Estonia, a man called Beqa Tsikeridze was sentenced to two years in prison, five years of ban from the country and 158,000 euros in damages for stealing books by Pushkin and Nicolas Gogol from the University of Tartu.
The BNF specified that it had strengthened its security procedures, which it reviews regularly.