UK man gets two-year suspended term for stealing R108 million gold toilet
A 37-year-old man was given a suspended two-year jail term Monday for his role in stealing a £4.5 million (R108 million) solid-gold toilet from a stately English home.
The fully functioning 18-carat artwork was stolen in a five-minute raid on an exhibition at Blenheim Palace -- the birthplace of Winston Churchill -- near Oxford in September 2019.
Frederick Doe, 37, was handed a suspended 21-month sentence after being found guilty in March of conspiracy to transfer criminal property, and ordered to complete 240 hours of unpaid work.
Judge Ian Pringle said Doe had been a "foolish" middleman in the plot.
"You had a limited function, you had no personal gain, you had no wider involvement and you were involved for a short period," he said.
The toilet artwork dubbed "America" was created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and had been on display as one of the star attractions at an exhibition in the 18th-century home.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
eNCA
11 hours ago
- eNCA
Shooter kills nine people at Austrian school
An attack on a school in southeastern Austria by a former student has left nine people dead, authorities said Tuesday, in a rare case of deadly gun violence in the Alpine country. Heavily armed police, a helicopter and paramedics descended upon the school in Graz, where 10 people including the alleged lone shooter were killed, regional police said. Six of the victims were female and three male, authorities later confirmed without specifying their ages. Twelve people suffered severe injuries. Police said the situation was "secure" and support was being provided to witnesses and those affected. The suspect acted alone and took his own life in the school toilet, police said, adding his motive remained unknown. Later on Tuesday, Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker declared three days of national mourning to remember the victims, saying the country had witnessed "an act of unimaginable violence". According to the police, the alleged perpetrator is a 21-year-old Austrian from the wider Graz region. The perpetrator used two weapons he had owned legally to carry out the attack. The suspected shooter was a former student at the school, but had not finished his studies, Interior Minister Gerhard Karnert told reporters. "It's a disaster, simply terrible. After all, it's about children," Hasan Darsel, a restaurant owner in the area, told the newspaper Kronen Zeitung. - 'Deeply shocked' - After arriving in Graz, Stocker described the shooting as "a national tragedy", adding that it was "a dark day" for Austria. AFP | Alex HALADA Condolences poured in from across Europe. The European Union's top diplomat Kaja Kallas said she was "deeply shocked" when she heard about the shooting. "Every child should feel safe at school and be able to learn free from fear and violence," Kallas posted on X. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said "our thoughts are with our Austrian friends and neighbours and we mourn with them" after the school shooting he called "horrific". Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban offered his "deepest condolences to Chancellor @_CStocker and the people of Austria" via social media. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said "the news from Graz touches my heart" while Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressed her sympathies to the families of the victims following the "tragic news". Attacks in public are rare in Austria, which is home to almost 9.2 million people and ranks among the 10 safest countries in the world, according to the Global Peace Index. School shootings are also much more uncommon in Europe than in the United States but in recent years Europe has been shaken by attacks at schools and universities, that were not connected to terrorism. In France on Tuesday, a teaching assistant was killed at a school in Nogent in the east following a knife attack. In January 2025, an 18-year-old man fatally stabbed a high school student and a teacher at a school in northeastern Slovakia. In December 2024, a 19-year-old man stabbed a seven-year-old student to death and injured several others at a primary school in Zagreb, Croatia. In December 2023, an attack by a student at a university in central Prague left 14 people dead and 25 injured. A few months earlier that year, a 13-year-old gunned down nine fellow classmates and a security guard at an elementary school in downtown Belgrade. By Julia Zappei With Kiyoko Metzler In Vienna
The Citizen
14 hours ago
- The Citizen
Rape of 11-year-old: Closing arguments presented in bail hearing
The bail hearing of a 28-year-old man accused of raping and impregnating an 11-year-old Boksburg girl was again postponed at the Boksburg Magistrate's Court yesterday (June 9). The matter will resume on June 12. This follows the defence and the State presenting their closing arguments for the bail application. The accused's lawyer, Frik van Rensburg, said the investigating officer's statement contains no supporting evidence and should not be relied upon. He pointed out that the child initially denied the alleged rape when questioned by her mother, raising the question of how the court could then accept her version of events. ALSO READ: State opposes bail as officer testifies in child rape case 'The prompting of the victim could, with all due respect, be indicative of an ulterior motive,' he said. Van Rensburg said the child was only assisted by her mother when the statement was taken — in English, not her mother tongue. State prosecutor Kagiso Ralethata argued that the State's case is not weak. 'The only thing outstanding is the DNA results, which could take about nine months. The victim was assessed by a doctor and no independent evidence was handed in to show that the applicant would be acquitted,' he said. 'The contentious point was the circumstantial evidence in the form of a statement from the victim's sister. 'It was highlighted that the witness is out of the country and that the investigating officer has not yet obtained her statement. 'We cannot say whether we will be able to obtain the statement. I will argue that, although the statement is important to a certain degree, it is not a crucial piece of evidence. The State can proceed without it.' The suspect, who cannot be named to protect the child complainant, was arrested on April 22. ALSO READ: Rape of 11-year-old: Investigating officer unsure when sibling will return to SA At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
Daily Maverick
a day ago
- Daily Maverick
Small Boat — a devastating novel about a migrant shipwreck and the cruelty of indifference
The deadly results of detached officialdom are made painfully clear in this harrowing novel. There's a particular kind of story that's rarely executed well – one without heroes, without lessons, without even the cold comfort of a villain you can confidently point at and say: there, that's the evil. Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat – a slim, bruising novel translated from its original French with quiet precision by Helen Stevenson – is that kind of story. Small Boat, which was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, centres on a real horror: the drowning of 27 people in the English Channel on 24 November 2021. They were crowded into an inflatable dinghy in the dark, reaching out over crackling radio lines, asking – in French, in English, in Kurdish – for help. They didn't get it. What is known and not imagined in Delecroix's pages is that both the French and British coastguards received their calls. And both hesitated, passing responsibility back and forth like a poisoned parcel. People died while operators discussed jurisdiction. The Cranston Inquiry, established to examine the failures of that night, is continuing, its transcripts and testimonies peeling back the layers of bureaucratic neglect. Delecroix doesn't give us the migrants' stories directly. He focuses instead on a fictional French coastguard operator, a woman who spent that night on the radio doing (or not doing) what her training, her weariness, her own justifications allowed. In the aftermath, she is questioned – not in a court, but in a room filled with mirrors. She faces a policewoman who looks like her, thinks like her, speaks with her same clipped, professional cadence. She listens back to recordings of her own voice on the rescue line, promising help that would not come, offering assurances she did not believe. She is left to reckon with the unbearable fact that someone, somewhere (was it her?) spoke the words: 'You will not be saved.' She isn't especially monstrous. She's tired. She's professional. She has a young daughter at home and an ex-partner who sneers at her work. She runs on the beach to decompress. In one of the novel's most arresting turns, she compares herself to a mass-produced tin opener: efficient, functional, affectless. Delecroix draws her with enough delicacy that we cannot quite hate her. And that, of course, is far more unsettling. Reading Small Boat, I thought – as one inevitably does – of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. Not evil as grand spectacle or ideology, but as administration, the quiet conviction that one is simply fulfilling a role. Arendt coined the phrase watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief Nazi organisers of the Holocaust. Eichmann organised the trains but claimed never to have hated the passengers. What Arendt saw was not a monster but a functionary – and that, of course, was the point. I thought, too, about my own work as an anthropologist researching forced displacement across Ireland, Turkey and Australia. I've sat with people whose lives are shaped not by violence in its cinematic form, but by violence as policy: the hotel room without a kitchen, the letter that never arrives, the bed that's taken away with no warning. I've heard a senior Irish official describe the state's provision of housing and support for asylum seekers as 'sufficient'. Meanwhile, people, stateless and waiting, are asked to prove their vulnerability again and again until even their grief is suspect. Institutional indifference The institutionalisation of indifference: that's the real story here. The smugness of protocols. The liturgy of duty rosters and shift reports. It wasn't evil that let those people drown in the Channel – it was ordinary people in warm offices citing rules, filling forms, following scripts. We can see the birth of such indifference in policies like the UK's abandoned Rwanda plan, which casually proposed outsourcing asylum itself, as if refuge were a commodity. Delecroix's brilliance lies in showing how violence at the border is carried out not by villains, but by workers. By women with mortgages, men on night shifts, people who've learnt to sort calls for help by urgency, credibility, accent. 'Sorting,' the narrator explains, 'is perhaps the most important part of the job.' Not all distress calls are equal. And the assumption – always lurking, never spoken – is that some lives are more likely to be saved. At one point, the narrator's colleague, Julien, answers calls from migrants by quoting Pascal: 'Vous êtes embarqués.' You are already embarked. A fatalist shrug disguised as wisdom. As if to say: you should have thought of all this before you left. The shrug does the work of a policy, the quotation the work of a wall. And yet, the narrator cannot fully perform indifference. She is haunted by the sea. She remembers loving it as a child. Now, it terrifies her. She feels it watching her, pursuing her, wanting to surge past the shore and swallow the continent whole. She runs along the beach to quiet her mind – a run that is almost the same length as the journey those on the dinghy tried to make. If Small Boat has a flaw, it's that it sometimes flirts with making guilt into its own form of lyricism. But this too may be deliberate. It is easier, perhaps, to feel sorry than to feel implicated. And far easier to narrate moral confusion than to prevent its causes. What Delecroix has written is not a redemption story. It's not a psychological thriller. It is a chamber piece for one voice and many ghosts. There are no grand gestures here, just small refusals, small failures. And the small, flickering boats of each human life, drifting towards – or away from – one another in the dark. In a world ever more brutal towards those who flee war, hunger and despair, Delecroix's novel is a necessary and merciless indictment. It reminds us that the shipwreck is not theirs alone. It is ours too. DM First published by The Conversation. Fiona Murphy is an assistant professor in refugee and intercultural studies at Dublin City University in Ireland. This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
