Priceless artefact snatched in Netherlands museum heist has been recovered, ending international search
A priceless gold 2,500-year-old helmet from Romania, stolen last year from a museum in the Netherlands has been recovered.
“It’s amazing. It’s the best news we could have got,” Arthur Brand said on Thursday, confirming that the Helmet of Coțofenești had been found.
“The Coțofenești golden helmet and the Dacian bracelets, 2,500-year-old gems of Romania’s ancient patrimony are coming home.”
The helmet was snatched in January 2025 by a gang of robbers who used firework bombs to break into the Drents Museum in and smashed display cases inside making off with the helmet and three golden bracelets.
They escaped with the trove, triggering a search and outrage in Romania where the pieces are classified as national heritage.
The Dutch government paid €5.7m in September 2025 after the theft in insurance money to compensate for the Dacian Golden helmet and three bracelets which were dramatically stolen.
Brand, nicknamed the “Indiana Jones of the Art World” has made headlines for his recoveries of high-profile stolen pieces of art, CBS reported.
In July 2025, he recovered a trove of stolen documents from the 15th to the 19th century, including several UNESCO-listed archives from the world’s first multinational corporation.
Before that, Brand helped Dutch police find a Brueghel painting that disappeared from a Polish museum over 50 years ago.
In 2022 returned a Roman statue that had been stolen from Musee du Pays Chatillonnais in 1973 and also recovered Salvador Dali’s “Adolescence,” a Picasso painting and “Hitler’s Horses,” sculptures that once stood outside the Nazi leader’s Berlin chancellery, CBS reported.
