Builders find treasure chest full of gold worth £7.5 million while renovating
Workers found a jackpot while renovating a cellar, with the owners of the fortune still unknown.
It's not every day you uncover a hoard of money, and even when you do, it's not usually this much cash.
But now that it happened, it could open up some missing links about its owners.
The unlikely event occurred in a building in Belgium, which saw 18-year-old Kobe find £7.5million stashed in the wall of a former brewhouse in the town of Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, near Brussels.
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The 11 August find came after the student worker attended the site with a colleague, where they began to get to work on sewage piping.
At around 8:15am, the pair started excavating a wall, and inside, were some coins.
At first, Kobe believed them to be normal euros, until gold nuggets and bars began to show.
At that point, he knew he'd stumbled upon something rare.
Kobe and his colleague were working for a charity group called CAW Oost-Vlaanderen, who they immediately contacted alongside the police.
According to the Daily Mail, the money has since been moved to a high-security vault courtesy of the Belgian government, but what remains a mystery is the identity of the owners.
Per reports, the bars are stamped with dates such as 1957 and 1961, which means it's not exactly a particularly old stash of cash.
So that rules out historical thefts prior to the 1800s.
According to Geert Hillaert of CAW Oost-Vlaanderen, it could take even years to locate the owners of the gold, with the outlet reporting him as saying: "First, it must be investigated to what extent the gold can be linked to criminal acts from the past.
"In addition, it is being examined whether rightful owners can still be found in some way."
Throughout Belgium's history, three heists have occurred that ended up with huge amounts of money, jewels and gold going missing.
The most recent was that of the Brussels Airport robbery in 2013 which saw 160 bags of diamonds and other jewels stolen from a boarding plane on the runway.
31 people were arrested in connection, but most were acquitted.
In 2011, the Bullion Heist was carried out by six gang members who committed an armed robbery in Wetteren, Belgium, per ITV.
According to the BBC, the group were involved in a raid on a bullion gold bar lorry and had recruited the lorry driver as their inside man on the job.
Finally, there's the perpetrators of the country's biggest ever robbery.
In February 2003, five men carried out a diamond heist in Antwerp, which culminated up to £100 million worth of diamonds, gold and other valuables.
“It was unbelief [sic], really,” Antwerp police detective Patrick Peys said in a 2004 report from ABC News. “It’s unimaginable that something like that happens because the buildings are secured quite well.”
Per People, most of the loot was never recovered, which meant they had to sentence the criminals based largely on circumstantial evidence.
Antwerp is just a 45-minute drive from the gold bars found hidden in the walls by the workers.
Interesting, isn't it?
Topics: Money, World News
Britt Jones