Australian police arrested a British tourist for allegedly stealing and swallowing a rare pink diamond worth over $180,000, officials said Friday.
Matthew Osborne, 29, was X-rayed by the police after he attempted to board a flight at Melbourne airport, Queensland, to New Zealand. The officials said the pink diamond was stolen from a jewelry store in Cairns, a city in north Australia.
Police traced him through CCTV footage and fingerprints left at the store, the Associated Press reports. He was arrested Thursday. Keith Bird, owner of the jewellery shop told Australian television that police told him the man confessed to stealing the diamond before swallowing it down.
According to the police, the X-ray results did not show up anything. "We hope that he'll be with us for some time," a detective, Kevin Goan, said at a press conference in Cairns, reports The Guardian.
Senior Sergeant Greg Giles said that police had not got the diamond yet, AP reported citing ABC. "The X-rays are inconclusive at this time. They haven't shown that the diamond has been swallowed, so we are making some follow-up inquiries. We're hoping he realises it'll obviously be in his best interests if he cooperates with us so we are hoping to get it back," he said.
Bird said that he does not think that the rare cut pink diamond is in the suspected man's body. "If he thought he'd got away with it, why would you sit at the Melbourne airport and swallow it, and if you have to go to the loo on a flight to New Zealand? That would be a bit dangerous," Bird said. "If he's not going to confess where the stone is, he's going to do some serious time," Bird added.
The diamond is reportedly 0.31 carat with a diameter of 4.3 millimeters (11/64 of an inch). Rio Tinto in Australia is the largest producer of pink diamonds in the world . High quality stones can get $1 million per carat, reports the Agence France-Presse. The cost of the pink diamonds is mostly based on the color more than the size.
