14 DAY TRIAL // Only a few days back, four rhino heads were stolen from the warehouse of a museum in Ireland. Presently, authorities are fairly sure that the people who have stolen these rhino heads were mainly interested in getting the animals' horns and selling them on the black market.
The rhino heads were in the custody of the Irish National Museum and were kept inside a warehouse located just north of Dublin, information shared with the public says.
According to several estimates, the rhino heads are worth a whopping $650,000 (€497,890), which is why few can be surprised that the gang who stole them were ready and willing to go to extreme lengths to get their hands on them.
Long story short, these three men all wore masks and had to overwhelm and tie up a guard at the warehouse in order to gain access to said animal body parts, The Inquisitr reports.
The same source informs us that the rhino horns stolen from this Irish museum were all over a century old. However, their horns were still suitable for being ground into powder and sold on the black market as traditional medicine.
Three of these heads used to belong to black rhinos from Kenya, whereas the fourth was taken from a white rhino that used to live in Sudan.
Interestingly enough, the rhino heads were only taken to this warehouse and locked inside in order to keep them safe from thieves.
Thus, several gangs have recently taken up the habit of stealing rhino heads and rhino horns from museums and other similar facilities, which is why the staff at the Irish National Museum saw fit to protect both the rhino horns and visitors by moving the animal body parts to what they assumed was a safer location.
“The pattern was to smash and grab, even when the museums were open, and we did not want to put the public at risk,” museum curator Nigel Monaghan reportedly told members of the press.
Authorities in Ireland are still out looking for the people who took these rhino heads, so here's hoping more news on this topic will soon be made available to the public.