Police recover lost works

Agence France-Presse

The paintings had gone missing from an art gallery in Maastricht, near the Belgian border, in 1987. After receiving a tip that the works had been put up for sale, police found six of the paintings in Valkenburg, in the south of the country, on Thursday. A subsequent house search in the small southern town of Walem yielded the other two works. Police arrested a 45-year-old German man who is a resident of Dubai, his 62-year-old Belgian mother and a 66-year-old man from Walem.

"Some of the art works had been folded and were seriously damaged," a statement by the prosecuting authority said. "The suspects were apparently trying to sell the artworks to the insurance company that had paid out 2.27 million euros (about $2.8 million) after they went missing." The modern-day value of the paintings has yet to be determined.

The works were by the 17th-century painters David Teniers (a Flemish artist), Willem van de Velde and Jan Brueghel de Jonge (both Dutch), and the 19th-century French artists Eva Gonzales, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Paul Desire Trouillebert.

"The investigation has yet to determine where the paintings have been for more than 20 years," the statement added. The suspects will appear before a court today.