Two men arrested over Banksy heist

The second of two men seen in a viral video removing a Banksy artwork from a south London street corner on Friday has been arrested on suspicion of theft and criminal damages, Metropolitan Police told reporters on Sunday. The man, said to be in his 40s, was not named.

The alleged art thief’s partner in crime, said to be in his 20s, was arrested on the same charges on Saturday and has already been bailed out pending further inquiries, according to the Met.

The two men were filmed removing the artwork – a stop sign decorated with three combat drones – less than an hour after Banksy had authenticated it on the artist’s Instagram page. After initially attempting to liberate the sign with their bare hands, according to onlookers, the thieves returned with a bolt-cutter and made short work of the hardware affixing the red octagon to the Commercial Way signpost in the borough of Peckham.

Police have urged anyone with information about the incident – specifically, the fate of the sign itself – to call in, as the art has not been recovered.

“We are not just talking about a street sign here. It is a work of art which was put there for the community. It is street art and it is for the people,” Southwark Council deputy leader Jasmine Ali told the BBC on Saturday. 

A new stop sign, minus the drones that were interpreted by the artist’s followers as a call for a ceasefire in Gaza, has reportedly been installed, and another street artist decorated the site with her own reproduction of the Banksy piece on Saturday.

The sign is likely to be worth over £500,000, gallerist John Brandler, who sells Banksy’s art, told the Guardian, noting that media attention had likely increased its value.

Some have hinted the brazen broad-daylight theft might have been a publicity stunt to drive up its price, as the artist’s team – known as ‘Pest Control’ – is known to issue the authenticity certificates required to fetch top dollar at auctions only to works deemed not to be stolen.

Last year, eight men were convicted in France of stealing a Banksy painting paying tribute to the victims of the 2015 Bataclan concert massacre. Stolen from the door of the Paris venue in 2019, it was eventually tracked to a farm in Italy and recovered. Another eight people were arrested by the Ukrainian authorities in December for stealing a mural the artist had painted on a wall in Gostomel, a town on the outskirts of Kiev.

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