Arrow Poison Stolen From Dutch Museum

Dutch police are looking for thieves who stole a safe from a Dutch museum that contains a potentially deadly poison formerly used by South American tribes to lace their arrows for hunting. The thieves broke into an outbuilding of the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave early Wednesday and stole the refrigerator-sized, free-standing safe.

“It’s a poison called curare, which is used in South America on arrows to kill animals,” Amito Haarhuis, director of what is the Dutch national museum of science and medicine, told AFP. “It was offered to us recently as part of a collection, but we decided we didn’t want to have it. So we locked it in the safe and we are going to have it destroyed safely.”

Police warned the public not to touch it because the poison, though dried out, is “very toxic and can be fatal.” There are no clues as to who has the safe, which also had a small amount of money.