Italian police said on Wednesday that they had recovered a work by the famous street artist Banksy commemorating the victims of the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015 stolen from the concert hall of the Bataclan.
The work was an image of a grieving girl painted on one of the emergency doors to the Paris location, where ISIS gunmen massacred 90 people. It had been cut and resumed in 2019.
“We recovered the stolen door in Bataclan with a work by Banksy depicting a sad young girl,” a senior Italian police official from Teramo, in central east Abruzzo, Italy, told AFP. The raid was carried out with French police, he added.
The work was found on an abandoned farm in Abruzzo, according to L’Aquila prosecutor Michele Renzo, who said further details would be provided on Thursday.
Works by Banksy, known for their distinctive style, irreverent humor and stimulating themes, were found on the walls, buildings and bridges of the West Bank during Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.
At auction, they sold for more than a million dollars.
Theft of works
The portion of the Bataclan door is not the only Banksy to have been stolen in Paris.
In 2018, the artist “bombarded” the French capital with murals during a lightning trip, which, according to him, was to mark the 50th anniversary of the Parisian student uprising of 1968.
After appearing to authenticate eight of the Parisian works on his Instagram account, it didn’t take long for the thieves to strike.
The stolen works included a fresco of a businessman in a suit offering a bone to a dog, who had just sawed off the animal’s leg.
Another was an image of a masked rat wielding a cutter, which disappeared from outside the Pompidou Center.
Banksy took the rat as his avatar, symbol of the vilified and oppressed, in homage to the Parisian street artist Blek le Rat. Blek began in 1968 when a general strike by students and workers put an end to France.
Some of the stolen works have since been recovered and fans have covered part of his street art in Paris with plexiglass to protect them.
But a mural of a migrant girl was disfigured with blue spray paint shortly after news of her discovery spread to social media.
Banksy is believed to have started as a graffiti artist in London, although he kept his identity a secret.
The most dramatic of his creations in Paris 2018 was a pastiche of “Napoleon crossing the Alps” by Jacques-Louis David, with Bonaparte wrapped in a red niqab. He appeared on a wall in an ethnically mixed neighborhood in the north of Paris.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
