Peron’s jewellery recovered in Italy

Italian police, in co-operation with their Spanish colleagues, have recovered 5.6 million euros worth of jewellery once owned by Eva Peron.

The jewellery, including a tiara given as a gift by the Dutch royal family, was originally stolen from a Spanish boutique in 2009 in an intricate fraud run by a Serbian criminal gang posing as Arab sheiks.

Last year Spanish police arrested six of the gang, and information supplied by one of them led the investigation to Italy.

There a gang member was identified and kept under surveillance for several months in an undercover operation before he led police to a hotel in Milan where the jewellery was recovered and the man was arrested.

Eva Peron was the wife of Argentine President Juan Peron in the 1950s. Despite her working-class roots she became the country’s first lady and dazzled with her expensive tastes, yet won great popularity, even reverence, from the masses with her speeches in their favour. She died in 1952 of cancer aged just 33.

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