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TWO BRITISH TEENAGERS were arrested on suspicion of stealing artefacts from the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Polish police said.
A spokesman for the site, which is now home to a museum, told AFP that guards on Monday caught the teenagers digging in the ground in an area where there were once barracks used to sort the personal items of arriving prisoners.
“They detained them and discovered that they were in possession of shards of glass, buttons, a hair clipper and bits of metal,” he told AFP.
Regional police spokesman Mariusz Ciarka said he expected prosecutors to make a decision regarding possible charges against the pair later in the day.
The Press Association is reporting this evening the pair have been released without charge, receiving suspended sentences.
Ciarka said the Britons born in 1997 and 1998 could have facd up to 10 years in prison for stealing objects of historical value from the site in the southern city of Oswiecim.
Sawicki said the area where the teens were digging was “a place where we still find objects in the ground that once belonged to the camp’s victims.”
It is not the first time someone has tried to smuggle out a piece of the former death camp, which has become a symbol of the Holocaust and is visited by more than a million people from across the world each year.
Several people have tried to make off with barbed wire, while one particularly brazen gang walked out with the camp’s infamous “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”) sign in 2009.
The mastermind of that theft, Swedish neo-Nazi Anders Hoegstroem, was jailed for two-and-a-half years.
The metal sign was eventually recovered cut up into three pieces, leading museum officials to display a replica above the entrance.
One million European Jews died at the camp set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland in 1940-1945.
More than 100,000 others including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters also died there, according to the museum.
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I’ve sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and, by gum, it put them on the map!
I’ve heard those things are awfully loud
Is there a chance the track could bend?
Not in your life my Hindu friend..
It glides as softly as a cloud
Were you sent here by the devil?
That floats on high per dales and hills …
No good sir, I’m on the level
Mono.. d’oh!!
^^^^
This is why the internet is fantastic. Bravo, lads, bravo.
This same thing happened like a month ago didnt it lol
For a country not long in it’s present existence, they sure have an awful amount of money to fling about…
You’ll get that when you just invade a country and steal land and displace the indigenous people, all because God says it’s cool.
No doubt Israel will continue to show blatant disregard for laws and rights of Palestinians by robbing more land from the Palestinians to build it.
Pretty cool.
I’m just waiting for someone to tell me why this isn’t as good as it sounds and most likely won’t revolutionise travel.
they could just use buses?
100 years ago they were saying “sure can’t they just use a horse and cart”
Buses? These are for commuters, people going to work and not for the unwashed in their onesies and jammie bottoms going O’Connell Street for their daily fix.
I want to go on one.
Mono. D’oh !!
I am waiting for beam me up scotty like they do on Star Trek
It be great get up in the morning, sure i will go to Sydney for the day
Spy cars.
Sydney monorail built for the Olympics was the worst piece of rail infrastructure I’ve ever been on.
Total recall!
have your say