Royal thief shot dead in Italy

A professional Italian thief who gained short-lived notoriety for having stolen jewellery and other items belonging to the Prince of Wales from St James’s Palace was shot dead at his home in northwest Italy, police said.

Police had no motive for the shooting of Renato Rinino, 41, said Rosalba Garello, an official with the Savona police department. Rinino’s brother, Paolo, was also injured in the attack.

Garello said that early today the gunman knocked on the door of the Savona home the brothers shared with their mother, fired at Paolo who had answered it, and then shot Renato in the head in his room.

He was pronounced clinically dead a short time later, Garello said in a telephone interview.

Rinino made headlines after he stole items including tie pins, gold buttons, watches, cufflinks and silver boxes from St James Palace in central London in 1994.

He had claimed to have burgled an elegant mansion while holidaying in London and that he only learned from newspaper accounts that his target was none other than St James Palace, where the prince stays in London.

The palace was not occupied at the time of the theft.

In 1997, Rinino’s then-lawyer Alessandro Garassini announced that his client had indeed committed the crime. He said Rinino wanted to return the goods personally – in exchange for a meeting with the prince, to have the rights to publish an account of the meeting, and to be spared any prosecution in Italy or Britain.

Rinino said he had waited until the statute of limitations for the crime expired in Italy to announce his client’s guilt.

It wasn’t clear whether any meeting took place, but the stolen items were returned to Charles in 1998 after police found them during a raid on Rinino’s house in Savona. At the time of the raid, Rinino was serving a jail term for an unrelated apartment theft.

On Friday, two days before he was killed, Rinino had another run-in with the law. He was sentenced to house arrest under a plea bargain agreement for having violated his parole for a previous crime that had required him to remain in Savona, Garello said.

Carabinieri paramilitary officers had spotted him at a restaurant in Genoa, just down the Ligurian coast from Savona, eating dinner with friends, recognised him as a repeat offender and arrested him for breaking his parole, she said.

“It’s strange because all of these things happened at the same time,” she said, noting that Rinino had been in the local media in recent days because of his latest arrest.