For the residents of Manching in Upper Bavaria, it only feels like a massive internet failure when strangers cut through a fiber optic cable. However, this trick may have been used to steal a historical treasure from the local museum.
Unknown persons have severed several fiber optic cables from a mobile phone provider in Upper Bavaria – and thus turned off the Internet and telephone for around 13,000 people. The perpetrator or perpetrators entered a technical room of the mobile phone provider in Manching (district of Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm) on Tuesday night and apparently cut cables on purpose, the police said. The mobile network was also initially affected by the failures. It could take up to three days for the supply to be restored. The police took over the investigation.
According to a report in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” (SZ), the perpetrators may have had their eye on a gold treasure in the Manching Celtic and Roman Museum. Despite well-secured alarm systems, 450 historical gold coins disappeared from the museum, their loss was discovered in the morning, the paper reported, citing an LKA spokesman who assumes damage in the millions. “It is still unclear exactly when the break-in took place and how the perpetrators proceeded,” the spokesman said.
An excavation team discovered the gold treasure in 1999 in Manching, where Celts had settled from the 3rd century BC. The museum thus guarded the largest Celtic gold find of the 20th century. It owes its existence to the spectacular find.
Although the museum and the valuable exhibits have been secured several times, there was apparently no alarm during the crime. The reason, according to SZ: unknown persons had paralyzed a central Telekom node and cut through several fiber optic cables. “The museum is actually a high-security wing. But all connections to the police have been cut,” Mayor Herbert Nerb told the newspaper. He suspected that the power outage and the museum robbery were related. “There were professionals at work,” said Nerb, referring to further investigations by the LKA, which he did not want to anticipate.