Farhad Hakimzadeh has been jailed for two years for stealing pages from rare books in London's famed British Library (pictured above).
From the story...
When police visited Hakimzadeh at his Knightsbridge home, they found matching copies of the same texts he had looked at in the British Library.
A painstaking examination, involving the inspection of such elements as the gilt edging of pages, water stains, and even worm holes, revealed pages from British Library texts that were either fixed or loosely inserted into books owned by Hakimzadeh.
It seems he often used a scalpel to cut pages out and had managed to evade CCTV cameras when doing so, employing "skill and deceit", the library said.
For example, police found a book at his home which contained an engraving of a world map by Hans Holbein the Younger, an artist employed by King Henry VIII.
The rare sixteenth century map - taken from the British Library - was visibly foreign to Hakimzadeh's copy of the book, because it had gilt edges unlike the rest of the pages.
That document alone is worth about £30,000.
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