Gold Bars

The treasure hunters who discovered the gold-laden Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha have found another part of the wreck that is yielding gold bars, money chains, silver coins and jewelry. The sparkling booty, estimated to be worth $500,000, was exhibited and unloaded from a salvage vessel Wednesday. The salvagers believe there could be millions of dollars more in treasure yet to be discovered.

Iraqis have finally managed to break into the safe of Kuwait's central bank but will have trouble making use of the gold inside, a Kuwaiti minister said today. Finance Minister Sheik Ali al Khalifa al Sabah said the coffers contained $10 million in foreign currencies and $350 million in gold bars. "The central bank was designed so that the safe falls into the sea if anyone tries to blow open the door," Sheik Ali said.

Historians tracing the origin of gold bars traded by Deutsche Bank during the Nazi era confirmed Friday that the bank profited from gold plundered from Holocaust victims. The historians were unable to determine with certainty whether bank executives knew that some of the gold purchased from the Reichsbank, the Nazi central bank, came directly from Jews sent to concentration camps.

More than two decades after a Central Valley fisherman found the body of a man floating in the California Aqueduct, the fugitive suspected of the killing has been arrested in Mexico and could be extradited here next week. Eric L. Wright, a former Alameda County sheriff's official, spent Thursday night in an Arizona jail and faces an extradition hearing Monday. Police in the Mexican port town of Guaymas arrested Wright this week and flew him to Maricopa County on the first flight out.

A man authorities said was the mastermind of a gold theft that helped topple Valley State Bank in Encino last year was sentenced to eight years in federal prison Tuesday. Don K. Gray II was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie in the theft of $600,000 in gold bars and coins from the small bank in late 1986. He pleaded guilty to three counts of wire and mail fraud. Rafeedie said the theft was a "significant factor" in the bank's failure.

At a remote spot in the Saudi desert Monday, Austrian gold experts led a U.N. team overseeing the return of Kuwaiti gold bricks looted by Iraq during its seven-month occupation of the emirate. The process was time-consuming because experts were weighing each of the 3,216 gold bars and testing them for purity. The bars had been trucked overland from Baghdad to Arar, a Saudi town on the Iraqi border.

A computer on Monday will begin dividing up about $100 million in booty retrieved from a sunken Spanish treasure ship, an executive of the salvage company that found the vessel last summer said. "So massive is the amount of treasure to be divided that a computer printout of the total inventory runs 2,500 pages, with a total number of items to be divided at about 125,000," said Bleth McHaley, a vice president of Treasure Salvors Inc.