Sculpture rescuers naive, says police

Police are considering charging a newspaper editor and manager who helped to broker the return of a stolen $250,000 sculpture.

The work Long Horizon by sculptor Paul Dibble was taken from Waikanae beachfront restaurant Swell this month.

Fearing the one-tonne sculpture would be melted down and sold for its scrap value, its owners offered a $10,000 reward.

Kapiti Observer editor Diane Joyce was this week contacted by a man claiming to be a go-between for the people holding the sculpture.

Newspaper manager Tony Young went with restaurant co-owner Chris Cameron for the successful swap.

But police were not notified until after the rendezvous and, despite making an arrest already, Senior Sergeant Alasdair MacMillan, of Kapiti, was far from pleased with being kept out of the loop until the swap was completed.

"That was certainly disappointing - that despite the fact that they had been in receipt of this information for a considerable period of time they chose deliberately not to contact police and chose to do it the way that they did."

Mr MacMillan said he could not discount the possibility that the manager and editor had committed a criminal offence.

"We could look at [a charge of] aiding and abetting an extortion.

"If it turns out that they withheld that information and knowingly assisted the third party to broker the deal, they would probably have committed a criminal offence," he said.

"But I'm certainly not going to say one way or the other. There's still a long way to go [in the investigation]."

People could have been killed if the encounter had gone wrong, said Mr MacMillan.

"They didn't take into consideration the possibility of violence - of it being a set-up.

"You can imagine if it turned nasty these guys knew that they were going to be there with $10,000. They were naive."

The one arrest so far has been a 30-year-old Otaki man, who appeared in the Porirua District Court yesterday on a charge of being an accessory after the fact to theft.

He was remanded on bail to reappear on November 29.

Mr MacMillan was hopeful police would catch the other people involved in the theft, saying they had positive lines of inquiry.

"We're still looking for the second person in the van and, obviously, the $10,000."

Restaurant owners Maggie Mouat and Gavin Bradley said they were delighted to have the sculpture back and Dibble was ecstatic his work of art had been returned.

- NZPA