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ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Aug 7, 2006 (UPI via COMTEX) -- Russian police have arrested two men and charged them with stealing $100 million in artifacts from St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum.
Information from a Moscow art dealer reportedly led to the arrest of the two suspects, one the husband of the museum's late curator, and the other her son, a correspondent for London's Independent newspaper reported.
Former curator Larisa Zavadskaya died of a heart attack in October last year, when the Hermitage began the inventory that led to the discovery the museum had been robbed of 221 items over six years.
The missing artifacts included dozens of precious icons, gold and silver 18th- and 19th-century jewelry, elaborate clocks, and gem-studded chalices and crosses.
Several of the items have already been recovered and the museum has posted a full list of the missing items on its Web site in hopes people who bought any of them in good faith would return them.
The museum owns more than 3 million objects but can display only 60,000 at a time, while the others are stored in more than 1,000 rooms.
URL: www.upi.com Copyright 2006 by United Press International
