Police in Slovenia have launched a manhunt for a statue of Melania Trump which has been erected for around five years. The statue suddenly went missing this week
A bronze statue of the US first lady Melania Trump has vanished from her home town in Slovenia – prompting a frantic search from the police. The life-size sculpture has stood proudly near the town of Sevnica since 2020, after it replaced a wooden statue from earlier that year.
It was showed off to the world during President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Police have launched an investigation after the statue was forced down and taken on Tuesday. So far, the police are unsure who was behind the brazen theft. On Thursday, cops confirmed the mystery disappearance and said they are doing everything they can to solve the crime.
Police spokeswoman Alenka Drenik Rangus said: “A theft was reported on May 13, and immediately police officers visited the crime scene and launched an investigation.”
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According to Slovenian media reports, the bronze replica was sawn off at the ankles and removed. The original wooden statue was set on fire in July 2020. The rustic figure was cut from the trunk of a linden tree, showing her in a pale blue dress like the one she wore at Mr Trump’s presidential inauguration in 2017.
Brad Downey, the artist behind the bronze replacement, earlier explained that the statue was inspired by “frustrations with the policies of my birth country.”
He wanted to portray the stark hypocrisy between the first lady being fast tracked to the US, compared to others who struggle with visa issues.
In 2020, he told The Guardian: “On the one hand we have people being held in cages on the US border with Mexico, on the other, in what is to me a clear contradiction, we have a first lady who is the first ever for whom English is not her mother tongue, whose US citizenship was fast-tracked on a visa reserved for immigrants with extraordinary ability. I felt I could isolate this contradiction and make a portrait of it.”
The artist helped select the craftsman Aleš “Maxi” Župevc for the project. Downey added: “I chose Maxi out of several local artists, because of the parallels between his life and Melania’s.
“He was born in the same month and year and at the same hospital as her. Like her – her father was a mechanic and she grew up in a high-rise – he is from a working class family.
“I took the position that I was not going to control the aesthetics of the project. I would keep a conceptual distance, and not dictate anything. I only gave him a photo to work from, of the moment she became the first lady.”