Gold theft in Manching: Old technology in the museum hinders investigation – Bavaria

“Gold and silver coins seized” was the headline above a message that the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (LKA) sent by email on Friday. The Deggendorf traffic police had caught an Italian, the historical coins were in a smuggling hiding place in his car. However, the gold coins have nothing to do with the Celtic Museum in Manching. According to information from the Carabinieri in Rome, the pieces can be assigned to the eastern part of Sicily. But it would also have been strange if the State Criminal Police Office had reported success in its manhunt for the theft of 483 gold coins from the Celtic and Roman Museum on Friday of all days. A spokesman has just announced that the investigation is progressing slowly – because of an outdated camera system in the museum.

This is an astonishing finding, as shortly after the theft, those responsible for the museum said that the security system would only be checked and judged appropriate in 2020 after jewels worth 113 million euros were stolen from the Green Vault in Dresden be. That now sounds decidedly different, at least from the LKA. “The camera system installed in the museum is a totally outdated system,” said a spokesman. Outdated software, outdated server, outdated hard drives.

The investigators even had to dismantle and remove the server and hard drives in the museum and take them to Munich to be able to read out all the relevant information there. However, it turned out that the experts in forensic science could not do anything with their resources either. “This is so old that you can no longer work normally with it,” says the LKA. Because updates and further developments are missing, it is a very big effort to evaluate the images. The investigators have now called in a specialist company with the help of which they want to make the images from the surveillance cameras usable. “In that case, it’s not our fault that we’re so slow, it’s also down to the museum that had installed such old technology.”

This, in turn, is a curious finding on the part of the State Criminal Police Office: When the security system was checked two years ago, two employees from the Archaeological State Collection were present, three from the museum’s special purpose association – and two LKA people. So the LKA has checked the security system, which it now castigates as “totally outdated”. The spokesman for the investigating authority states that it is not up to the LKA to implement the advice of the security experts. The LKA is currently trying to find out internally what exactly the LKA security experts advised the museum to do to improve the security system. The spokesman does not expect answers before Monday.

According to Rupert Gebhard, senior collection director of the Archaeological State Collection, the report after the 2020 inspection basically pointed out that the technical systems, including the video systems, should be kept up to date with the latest technology. Above all, the quality of the images was apparently viewed critically. Gebhard emphasizes that a contract between the state collection and the special-purpose association clearly states that the inspection and maintenance of technical systems is the task of the special-purpose association. “We would only be informed if the system failed completely and something needed repairing.”

On Friday, however, the association only announced that it would prefer to only answer questions on the subject in writing. By Friday afternoon, however, there were no answers to questions about how the LKA can present the camera system as so outdated. Independent experts had raised doubts about the security concept of the museum shortly after the theft.

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