WELLINGTON (AFP) – A stolen statue of Lord Ernest Rutherford, a pioneer of nuclear physics, will be reunited with its feet after a quick-thinking police officer dived into an icy New Zealand river to arrest the suspected thief.
Lord Rutherford, who won the Nobel Prize in 1908, was born in the town of Brightwater, on New Zealand’s South Island, where a statue of him as a child stood until it was stolen on Friday night with only the feet remaining.
Images of the thief cycling away from the scene on a bicycle carrying the heavy metallic statue were caught on CCTV.
However, when the 35-year-old man suspected of stealing the statue jumped into the flooded Wai-iti River in the middle of winter to evade police on Sunday night, constable Jamie White plunged into the icy waters to make the arrest.
