A court in Paris issued prison sentences to six Georgian citizens ranging from 18 months to seven years on charges of stealing rare books by Russian writers from European libraries.
Five men and a woman were accused in the case. Only four defendants attended the trial. Two others had previously been arrested and already sentenced in Georgia to five years in prison. Georgia does not extradite its citizens. A Paris court sentenced them in absentia to six years in prison.
Other defendants in the case were sentenced in other countries. Among them is the main accused, Mikhail Z. (Zamtaradze), who was sentenced by a court in Paris to seven years in prison. In Lithuania, he was previously sentenced to three years and four months in prison for stealing rare books. Lithuania extradited Zamtaradze to France to stand trial.
The defendants in the case are accused of stealing dozens of rare books from libraries in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Switzerland in 2022-2023. Their target was mainly books by Russian writers, particularly first editions of Alexander Pushkin or Nikolai Gogol. During the trial, He writes Zamtaradze stated in the BBC Russian Service that he had received an order to buy books from Moscow.
In total, the criminal group is suspected of stealing at least 170 books with a total value of around 2.5 million euros. Some of the stolen books were sold at auctions in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
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