Diana hurriedly pulled out her phone. A tweet had already blown up. Someone had posted the entire process of stealing "The Serpent of Phryne" on the dark web, along with photos of the artifact after it had been smashed.
When Diana saw the photos, she laughed in anger. So that was why the damn artifact had been so heavy. The stone on the outside was just a shell, while the inside was actually concrete.
The photo was slightly overexposed, but it was still clear enough to see that the shattered "The Serpent of Phryne" had an imitation-stone outer layer, seemingly made of some kind of composite material, though it might also have been covered with a natural stone veneer. Inside, however, it was entirely concrete—obviously modern high-strength concrete at that.
If there had only been that photo, it would not have meant much. Even if they had released a video of the theft, they could have staged it themselves. But the fatal problem was that the content of their video matched the police announcement, and the video had been posted first.
As mentioned before, because the sculpture involved aliens, every country had taken it seriously, putting considerable pressure on them. The police had investigated for quite a while without finding anything, until Diana spotted a detail and deduced how the crime had been committed.
Those thieves had been skilled. They had removed the glass from the floor-to-ceiling window, then carried the sculpture out through it. That counted as a major investigative breakthrough. To ease the pressure on themselves, the police quickly released their progress.
Logically, they should not have disclosed the details of the crime, lest someone imitate it. But the museum director did not want to shoulder such enormous responsibility either. He only wanted everyone to think the thieves