A British collector bought a Soviet tank and found gold bars in it
Nick Mead, a 55-year-old British tank collector, bought a Soviet T-54 tank from Iraq on eBay. While restoring the car, the Briton found five gold bars worth 2 million pounds (approximately 141.5 million rubles) in the fuel compartment. The tank itself cost the Foreign Ministry 30 thousand pounds (about 2.1 million rubles). The collector believes that the ingots were stolen by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait during the Gulf War.
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Collector Nick Mead (left) with 50-year-old mechanic Todd Chamberlain. They videotaped how they open the fuel tank, in case they find ammunition and need to show them to bomb disposal specialists. However, instead of bombs, the men extracted ingots weighing up to 5 kilograms each from the tank. According to preliminary calculations of the mechanic, the total value of this gold exceeds 2 million pounds.
Chamberlain added: "We didn't know what to do. You can't just bring five gold bars to a brokerage company — you will have questions. That's why we called the police."
Disassembling the tank, Meade and Chamberlain found ammunition for machine guns and feared that they might find the machine guns themselves, but instead they got gold. The men believe that it was stolen by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait during the Gulf War, and after the tank was captured and transported to the UK. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs assumes that the looters made a hole in the fuel tank.
Two policemen took the ingots from the men, handing them a receipt about it. Now the gold is stored in London in a safe deposit box. The press service of the Northamptonshire County Police said it could not comment to the media "for technical reasons."
The collector does not complain: "Even if I don't get some of the gold back, I'll still have my beautiful tank."
Nick Mead, who owns a whole collection of 150 combat vehicles, founded the Tanks-a-Lot rental company: on his farm in Helmdon (Northamptonshire), fans of technology can drive any of the collector's tanks.
Keywords: Great Britain | Gold | Treasure | Collectors | Finds | Tanks