Having smashed through the Swiss museum’s front doors, three masked men dressed in black moved swiftly towards a cabinet. Within seconds they had removed two delicate Ming-dynasty bowls and a vase worth £2.8 million before disappearing into the night.
The break-in at Geneva’s Museum of Far Eastern Art is part of a pattern of raids on museums across Europe targeting Chinese antiquities.
One theory suggested that the break-ins had been organised by the Chinese government to return items it considers stolen by British and French forces during the 19th century, most notably following the capture of the Old Summer Palace at the end of the Second Opium War in 1860. A Hollywood studio is developing a movie called The Great Chinese Art Heist based on the hypothesis.
It can now be disclosed, however, that the Geneva raid was carried out by a violent British career criminal suspected of leading a gang of “city-break raiders” who targeted Chinese antiquities across Europe.
Daniel Kelly, 46, appears an unlikely international art thief. But prosecutors describe him as being “at the top end” of criminality and his short foreign holidays coincided with the burglaries of museums, galleries and jewellers.
“He worked out that these museums have many millions of euros’ worth of exhibits but actually pretty weak security,” said a source with knowledge of the investigation. “They were easy targets for little risk.”
When police raided properties linked to Kelly, they found a book containing details of valuable Chinese antiques held in European museums.
“Because Kelly quickly left each country, the local police could not trace him; and because they were outside the UK, the travel links were not pieced together,” said the source.
Members of a British gang were convicted in 2016 of the thefts of £57 million worth of Chinese antiquities which it is believed were stolen to order from museums and auction houses. The targets included Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum and Durham University’s Oriental Museum.
Despite the gang’s arrest in 2012, the raids in the UK and Europe continued. During a burglary in 2015, thieves stole “priceless” items from Empress Eugénie’s Chinese Museum at Château de Fontainebleau on the outskirts of Paris including a replica of a crown of the King of Siam given to Emperor Napoleon III.
In 2018, jade and gold Chinese objects were stolen during a break in at the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath. A museum spokeswoman said some items were recovered but no one has been charged with the theft.
Investigators are piecing together Kelly’s movements across the world in an attempt to link him to thefts. He is already wanted in Switzerland in relation to the Geneva museum raid. His fellow gang members Louis Ahearne, 36, and his brother Stewart Ahearne, 46, have already been jailed after admitting their roles in the break-in.
Kelly, of Greenwich, southeast London, and the Ahearne brothers first visited Geneva in February 2019 before travelling to the Netherlands. That month a gang stole 11 Chinese antiques from the Princessehof Ceramics Museum in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden. Within months, two other Dutch museums with Chinese collections were targeted.
The Kelly gang returned to Geneva in June to break into the Museum of Far Eastern Arts. They carefully selected a 15th-century Ming bottle vase with a secret pomegranate decoration, a small wine cup dated between 1465 and 1487 and an An Huan phoenix design bowl dating from 1368 to 1398.
Kelly’s son Kaine Wright, a former academy footballer at West Ham United, was jailed in 2023 after being caught in London trying to sell the vase, worth £1.9 million.
Details of Kelly’s activities can be published after he and the Ahearne brothers were found guilty at the Old Bailey on March 24 of conspiracy to murder Paul Allen weeks after the Geneva raid. Allen was previously convicted of Britain’s biggest cash robbery in which £54 million was taken from a Securitas warehouse in Kent in 2006.
Allen was left paralysed after being shot at the home he rented from the comedian Russell Kane in northeast London. Allen’s daughter was injured during an earlier attempt to shoot him, the year before.
Kelly and his son are also wanted in Japan, where they are accused of a violent robbery at a branch of the American jeweller Harry Winston in central Tokyo in 2015. A security guard was attacked before the raiders escaped with 46 items of jewellery valued at £630,000.
Japan has made its first extradition request to the UK for the return of Kelly and Wright. The case against Kelly has been delayed because of the Allen shooting but the Court of Appeal approved Wright’s extradition in January. He has appealed to the Supreme Court.
Kelly is alleged to be linked to high-value break-ins stretching from Thailand to the Caribbean island of St Lucia.
His criminal record dates back to the 1990s and includes previous convictions for burglary, aggravated burglary and kidnapping. In 2016 he became the first person in Britain to be jailed for using a drone to smuggle drugs into prisons.
Kelly and Louis Ahearne were both jailed in 2020 after being convicted of being part of a burglary during which they dressed as police officers and drove a car with blue flashing lights. The target was an apartment at Ide Hill, a 16th-century mansion converted into luxury apartments in Sevenoaks, Kent.
Kelly is unlikely to break the underworld’s code of silence by detailing his escapades as an international antiques thief.
He told police investigating Allen’s shooting that he feared for his life if he revealed any information, explaining: “I reckon I would be murdered for it.”
