First the “stalking”, then the assault and theft. They escaped with a watch valued at 150,000 euros, but one of them lost his wallet and phone. It was precisely this “detail” that caused the handcuffs. Two Algerians aged 35 and 37 were arrested by the police: they would be the bandits behind the robbery of a Richard Mille, a robbery that occurred on May 20, 2022 in front of a restaurant in the center of Milan, where a 34-year-old French tourist who was with his partner. The preventive detention order, issued by the Milan prosecutor’s office, was issued following investigations carried out by agents of the investigation team of the central police station.
Through closed-circuit images of the area, detectives reconstructed that the robbery was not “random”: the victim was hooked since his arrival at the restaurant. Once “identified”, the man was waited until the exit when the couple approached him with a pretext and after a struggle violently snatched his watch.
After a brief chase, the victim managed to block the aggressor, starting another fight in which the 35-year-old accomplice also intervened. The latter, in addition to helping his partner, took delivery of the watch and then fled. During the escape, the 37-year-old man lost his mobile phone and his wallet, inside which a French identity document was found with the photo of the attacker and data from another person, actually unrelated to the matter.
Through this detail, the police identified the hotel where they had checked in. Not only that, more than 100 photographs of valuable watches “with broken straps” were found on the found phone. Elements that, according to investigators, suggest that “the latter was an expert in this type of crimes committed throughout Europe.” Also found on the phone were photographs of two other Belgian ID cards that turned out to be fake, and a photo of an Algerian ID card showing his real personal details.
At the end of the investigation, the Milan prosecutor’s office issued a preventive detention order in prison, a European arrest warrant and an international arrest warrant. The 35-year-old man was captured last February and the sentence was served in prison. However, the 37-year-old man was located and detained in Algeria in recent days.
