Thieves have wrenched the horns off stuffed rhinoceroses in at least five European museums in the past few days, apparently with an eye to grinding up the horns to make an Asian potency remedy, according to dpa. Police in the German town of Bamberg and the Italian city of Florence disclosed the latest two thefts Thursday. The horns apparently had a black market value of tens of thousands of euros. Trade in horn is illegal under world nature protection treaties. Traditional Chinese medicine credits horn dust with curative powers. Some people also believe the dust is an aphrodisiac. Bamberg's Natural History Museum noticed at the weekend that a glass case had been broken open and a 20-centimetre horn weighing 1.2 kilograms was gone. The theft was not at first made public. Like other natural history museums visited by the thieves, Bamberg's museum lets visitors tour the exhibits unsupervised. Earlier, a museum of hunting at Gifhorn, Germany reported a two-horned stuffed rhino, once bagged by a big-game stalker, lost his horns on Saturday. Two men aged about 40 bought entry tickets, broke off both horns and ran away with them. Hamburg's zoology museum said last week someone broke in after hours and took six horns, including those of a rare Asian species. The Wednesday evening haul of three horns from a glass case in the Florence Natural History Museum included one that was 1 metre long, said the chief curator, Giovanni Pratesi. The Daily Telegraph new website in London reported a similar theft at the Haslemere Educational Museum in England.
