Despair etched on art expert's face as he confirms fragments of artwork found in oven ashes were those of stolen paintings by old masters



Olga Dogaru claims she hid the art when son Radu was arrested in January

She said she buried them at an abandoned house and later burned them

The paintings were stolen in a brazen raid at a Rotterdam gallery in 2012

The works, part of a collection of 150, are said to be worth £100million



Ash in the stove of a Romanian woman may hold the clue to the fate of stolen paintings said to be worth around £100million, saddened art experts revealed today.

Some paint pigments recovered from the stove of the mother of a man charged with stealing seven paintings contain chemicals from colours often used in the 19th and 20th century - but not anymore.

Forensic scientists at Romania's National History Museum examined ash from the stove of Olga Dogaru, whose son is the chief suspect in last year's theft of paintings in the Netherlands.

Sadness: Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu (left), manager of Romania's National History Museum and Gheorghe Niculescu (right), head of a team of investigative experts, at a news conference in Bucharest Burial: The local cemetary, presumably the place where stolen paintings were allegedly buried before being destroyed, by Olga Dogaru, mother of a Romanian art theft suspect, is pictured in Carcaliu village, Romania Location: A general view of Carcaliu village. Local resident Olga Dogaru - mother of suspect Radu Dogarus, accused of stealing seven masterpieces from Monet, Picasso and Gauguin - said she burned the artworks

Mrs Dogaru initially admitted burning the paintings - which include a Matisse, a Picasso and a Monet - to protect her son, but later denied doing so, authorities said.

Museum boss Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu said a probe found traces of ‘very old’ yellow arsenic, which painters said has not been in common use since the Second World War because of its toxicity.

Prosecutors claim that Mrs Dogaru feared for her son Radu when he was arrested in January following the early morning raid last October.

Mrs Dogaru had allegedly said that she buried the art in an abandoned house and dug them up a month later before burning them when detectives began searching the village for them.

Stolen: 'Reading Girl in White and Yellow' by Henri Matisse, left, and 'Harlequin Head' by Pablo Picasso, right, were two of the seven paintings stolen from the Kunsthal gallery in Rotterdam last October

Destroyed? Charing Cross Bridge, London by Claude Monet is one of the more famous works that Ms Dogaru claims to have burned

Gone: Waterloo Bridge, London by Claude Monet has not been seen since the theft in October 2012

Prosecution spokesman Gabriela Chiru said last month that the authorities did not necessarily believe Mrs Dogaru's claims and added that it could be months before test results are conclusive.

Thieves managed to bypass the sophisticated alarm system, in what police say was a well-prepared 3am robbery at the Kunsthal last autumn.

The seven paintings stolen were Monet’s Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge (both 1901), Picasso’s Harlequin Head (1971), Matisse’s Reading Girl In White And Yellow (1919), Lucian Freud’s Woman With Eyes Closed (2002), Gauguin’s Girl in Front of Open Window (1898) and Meyer de Haan’s Autoportrait (1890).

The theft was one of the art world's most dramatic in recent years and one of the biggest ever to take place in the Netherlands.

Missing: Prosecutors say that they do not necessarily believe Ms Dogaru's claims that she destroyed the paintings including Girl in Front of Open Window by Paul Gauguin, pictured Robbery: Self-Portrait' by Meyer de Haan, left, and Woman with Eyes Closed by Lucian Freud, right, were two of a collection of 150 paintings on display in Rotterdam at the time of the heist



Disappeared: An empty space where one of Henri Matisse's stolen paintings was on display is pictured following the heist

The Kunsthal exhibition, displaying a large part of the Triton Foundation's avant-garde collection for the first time in one gallery, opened just a few days before the heist to celebrate Kunsthal's 20th anniversary.

The Triton Foundation exhibition was showing works by more than 150 famed artists, including Alexander Calder, Paul Cezanne, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, August Rodin, and Andy Warhol.

The Kunsthal, meaning 'art gallery' in Dutch, is a display space that has no permanent collection of its own.