HONG KONG: Hong Kong police yesterday searched for a valuable painting mistakenly dumped in a landfill after it sold for $3.7m at auction, reports said.
“Snowy Mountain” by Chinese artist Cui Ruzhuo, which was a main feature of the spring auction by Beijing-based Poly Culture this week, was dumped by cleaners at the luxury hotel hosting the sale, the South China Morning Post said.
Grand Hyatt hotel cleaners were suspected of dumping the painting, which sold on Monday for more than $3.71m, along with rubbish that was taken to a landfill, the paper said, citing an unnamed police source.
Poly Culture did not comment immediately when contacted by a reporter.
Police suspected the painting was thrown out by cleaners after viewing security camera images but would not rule out the possibility of it having been stolen, media reported.
Police said a theft case was reported on Tuesday by an auction house staff member regarding a painting, without further details.
Plane crash kills American pilot
JAYAPURA: A light aircraft crashed into a fence during take-off in eastern Indonesia yesterday, killing the US pilot and a passenger, police said.
The US-made Kodiak plane was carrying six passengers and was chartered to deliver humanitarian supplies to a remote district in Indonesia’s easternmost Papua province.
“The American pilot and an Indonesian passenger were killed in the accident. The aircraft partly caught fire,” Papua province police spokesman Sulistyo Pudjo said.
The plane crashed into a fence by the tarmac, he said, adding that five other passengers were injured, two of them seriously.
Agencies
