Azernews.Az

Two paintings - a Cubist portrait by Pablo Picasso, known as Tête, and Marc Chagall's "Man in Nature" depicting a praying man - were stolen in February 2010 from a villa in Tel Aviv owned by the Hercikovich family, Azernews reports, citing foreign media.

14 years after they were stolen from a collector, the paintings were found in the basement of the Belgian city of Antwerp.

At that time, both paintings were valued at $900,000. At the same time, the robbers also stole jewelry worth $ 680,000 from the safe, which was never found.

It was only at the end of 2022 that investigators achieved a breakthrough in their decade-long search for paintings, when the Belgian police received a tip that an art dealer was offering two paintings for sale in Namur (Belgium).
During an undercover operation that lasted several months, police tracked the movements of the suspect, a 68-year-old Israeli luxury watch dealer, whom Belgian police call "Daniel Z".

After conducting a search of the suspect's house at the request of the prosecutor, the federal police found a significant amount of money, but the location of the paintings remained unknown.

"The checks and police measures carried out during 2023 made it possible to establish that the suspect owned the wanted works and that he could have kept them at his home or the house of one of his relatives," police officers told the French–speaking Belgian daily Le Soir. "Even though the suspect confessed to having the paintings, he refused to say where he kept them."

Having failed to get any leads from the suspect, investigators expanded their search to Antwerp, where they completely checked the building, which previously housed an art dealer associated with the theft of paintings in the past. Here they found two wooden crates with screw-down lids, which contained the stolen works of art.

According to the police, the paintings were not damaged and were still in their original frames. The main suspect was charged with stealing two paintings, after which he was taken into custody.

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