london
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A man who stole a signed print of Banksy’s Girl with a Balloon from a London gallery has been sentenced to more than a year in prison.
Larry Fraser, 49, was sentenced on Friday to 13 months in prison for stealing 2004 prints worth 270,000 pounds (about $355,000) from the Globe Gallery in the upscale area of Fitzrovia in the British capital last September, the Metropolitan Police said.
Police said Fraser pleaded guilty to one count of non-residential burglary.
“Members of the police aviation unit worked tirelessly to identify the suspect and were able to track him several streets away, where they identified him as Fraser,” police said in a statement Friday. “He was also seen on CCTV loading the artwork into a van before fleeing the scene.”
The Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad, a specialized unit tasked with investigating serious organized crime, recovered the artwork within four days of Mr Fraser’s arrest and an “undercover operation”, the Metropolitan Police said.
A video shared online by police shows a hooded man breaking the gallery’s glass door before climbing onto the building and removing prints from the wall.
In a statement shared by police, gallery manager Lindor Mehmetaj, 29, said he was “completely shocked” by the robbery and thanked police for their “amazing” response.
Detective Inspector Scott Mather, who led the police investigation, said Banksy’s Girl with Balloons was known “all over the world”.
“We acted quickly to not only bring Fraser to justice, but also to reunite the work with the gallery,” Mather said in a statement.
The iconic image of a girl reaching for a red heart-shaped balloon, painted by an anonymous British graffiti artist, made headlines in 2018 when it self-destructed shortly after the painting sold for $1.4 million.
