€1.6m gold 'stolen' on Air France flight
Gold bars worth 1.6 million euros disappeared from a shipment on an Air France flight between Paris and Zurich last week, French media said Tuesday, in a robbery that police believe was an inside job.
By FRANCE 24
A shipment of gold on an Air France flight from Paris to Zurich last week arrived 44 kilos lighter than when it was registered at Charles de Gaulle airport, TV stations TF1 and LCI reported Tuesday.
The gold bars, worth around 1.6 million euros, was part of a 300kg shipment handled by the Brink’s secure transportation company last Thursday.
Brink’s realised that the gold was missing on Friday after it arrived in Switzerland.
According to the reports, this type of shipment on the same aeroplane takes place almost daily, and Brink’s employees supervise the loading and stay on the tarmac until the plane has taken off.
Officials said they believed the theft was probably an inside job. The thieves “almost certainly had accomplices working at the airport”, according to the source who spoke to the media.
Brink’s has some 1,800 security staff employed at French airports.
The gold theft took place the day before police discovered a vast 1.3-tonne haul of pure Colombian cocaine aboard an Air France flight from Caracas to Paris.
