Two years after it was plucked from a Ukrainian museum, Caravaggios 1573–1602 painting The Taking of Christ (or The Kiss of Judas) has been recovered by joint team of German and Ukrainian officials in Berlin. Police arrested four suspects believed to be part of an international art-crime ring in Berlin and twenty more suspects were arrested in Ukraine as part of operation, according to the Associated Press.

The suspects arrested in the case had reportedly brought the work to Berlin in the hope of selling it to a German collector. The world-renowned painting, whose value some experts had tagged at much as one hundred million dollars, was stolen in July 2008 by thieves who entered the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art through a window and removed a glass pane shielding the work without setting off the alarm.

After the theft, the Odessa Museum's director, Vladimir Ostrovsky, claimed late last year to have identified an anonymous Venetian portrait in the museum's collection as in fact being by Titian — a sign, he said, that “God has compensated us for the terrible loss that we suffered last year” when the Caravaggio disappeared. However, experts at the Hermitage Museum disputed the Titian attribution. One wonders whether Ostrovsky is sticking to that claim now that The Taking of Christ has been recovered.