Picasso painting stolen from Greece's National Gallery in 2012 is found hidden in a ravine: Art-lover thief who lived in England is arrested and says he flushed other artwork down the loo

A Picasso painting stolen from Greece's National Gallery has been found hidden in a ravine nearly nine years after it vanished, officials announced on Tuesday. 

The painting - which was personally donated by the Spanish master to the Greek people - was stolen alongside two other artworks in an audacious heist in 2012.

Until now, the perpetrator had evaded officials, but a 49-year-old who is said to have lived between Greece and England has now been arrested and later confessed.

Picasso's 'Head of a Woman' stolen from Greece's National Gallery in 2012 has been found hidden in a ravine nearly nine years after it vanished, officials announced on Tuesday

The painting, called 'Head of a Woman' and gifted by Pablo Picasso to Greece in 1949, was recovered in Keratea, a rural area some 28 miles southeast of Athens, officials told a news conference.

A video shared online by the Greek police showed where the man had hidden the paintings. They were found in a ravine, wrapped in plastic sheets for protection and hidden beneath some dense and dry shrubbery in a riverbed, the footage shows.

Two other paintings were stolen in the same heist in January 2012. One, called 'Stammer Windmill' by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, was also found with the Picasso. 

A sketch by 16th-century Italian artist Guglielmo Caccia, better known as Moncalvo, was also stolen, but state television reported it was damaged in the heist and flushed down a gallerey toilet, something the suspect has reportedly confessed to.  

'Today is a special day, (a day of) great joy and emotion,' Culture Minister Lina Mendoni told reporters, adding that the Gallery's 'greatest wound has been healed'.

Mendoni said the painting would have been 'impossible' to sell as it had a personal inscription by Picasso on the back - 'For the Greek people, a tribute by Picasso.' 

But police sources told ARTNews it was possible the work had been offered for £15m on the black market but failed to find a buyer. 

The 2012 heist at the National Gallery, Greece's largest state art collection, lasted just seven minutes, but the planning behind it was meticulous. 

The break-in saw the sole guard distracted by alarms that were set off throughout the night until he disabled the system. He then went to check one part of the museum while the burglar slipped in through an unlocked balcony door elsewhere. 

In the short time he was inside, he was able to strip the Picasso and Stammer Windmill from their frames and escape.

It was originally believed that two men broke in, cutting the paintings from their frames, but police have arrested just one person, the 49-year-old Greek construction worker, in connection with the case. He has not been named.

Pictured: Stills from a video showing the painting's hiding place, where it was found by police wrapped up. The man moved the paintings from a warehouse in Keratea to the ravine where they were finally discovered

'Head of a Woman', (pictured right next to 'Mill' by Piet Mondrian) gifted by Pablo Picasso to Greece in 1949, was recovered in Keratea, a rural area some 28 miles southeast of Athens, officials told a news conference

According to Greek news site Proto Thema, police said that the man, who claimed to be an art lover himself, watched guards at the gallery every day for over six months, learning their movements and shift patterns, and when they took cigarette breaks.

He would visit the gallery as a visitor or watch it from a distance, taking notes. 

Investigators believe that he had worked as an oil painter himself and had knowledge of the materials and of the gallery, and that he stole what he could get his hands on in the short window he was inside for the heist.

They believe that he planned to wait a decade before selling the artworks, but his plan began to unfold at the end of last year when police started to monitor him, and learned that the painting had not left Greece.

It was found that the man had connections to the art world, and after learning that the police were on his trail, he moved the paintings from a warehouse in Keratea to the ravine where they were finally discovered.

The man was set to leave for the Netherlands this week, and so officers - fearing they may lose him abroad - moved in and arrested him.   

Another painting stolen in the same heist in January 2012, 'Stammer Windmill' by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (pictured right) was also found

'I am a man who loves art, I wanted to do it for myself, I did not intend to sell them,' the 49-year-old man reportedly told police when he was finally caught.

His arrest brings to a close an almost 10-year investigation that saw officials scour both legal and illegal art auctions across the globe, as well as private collections, thieves and black-market traffickers.

When he was caught, the man - who local reports say is married and divorced with children - was cooperative, and confessed that he was the one to 'disappear' the artwork. 

His lawyer Sakis Kechagioglou said: 'My client showed practical remorse. It is an indisputable success of the Greek Police and the Department of Burglars to investigate this much acclaimed case and as a citizen I express my satisfaction for the recovery by the National Gallery and the Greek State Museum.

'It is also an indisputable fact that in this finding and recovery, my client played a decisive role, with his full cooperation with the law enforcement authorities from the beginning and the practical remorse he showed, the statement added. 

According to reports, the man said that it was his love of art that led him to the theft, and that he knew that he would not find a buyer willing to pay the value of the painting he could not prove he was the owner of.

Furthermore, had it ever been found in a buyer's collection, it would be returned to Greece as its rightful owner with the buyers punished. The man was never able to get the paintings abroad to sell them on the black market.   

Pictured: A cubist female bust by the Spanish painter Picasso, left, and a 1905 representational oil painting of a riverside windmill by the Dutch painter Mondrian are displayed by police officers, in Athens during a press conference on Tuesday, June 29

Picasso, who died in 1973, had given the cubist painting to the Greek state in recognition of the country's resistance to Nazi Germany during the painful 1941-44 occupation.

'This painting is of particular importance and sentimental value to the Greek people, as it was personally dedicated by the great painter to the Greek people for their fight against fascist and Nazi forces,' she said. 

A state report found that the National Gallery's security had not been upgraded for over a decade, with the then police minister calling safeguards 'non-existent.'

Several areas in the museum were out of range of security cameras, while the alarms were faulty and prone to ringing gratuitously.

In addition, the gallery was on reduced security staffing at the time owing to a three-day staff strike.

'Today is a special day, (a day of) great joy and emotion,' Culture Minister Lina Mendoni told reporters. Mendoni said the painting would have been 'impossible' to sell as it had a personal inscription by Picasso on the back - 'For the Greek people, a tribute by Picasso'

On the night of the heist, the burglar had set off an alarm by manipulating an unlocked door to send the sole guard elsewhere in the building.

The guard told police he ran after one thief, who dropped another Mondrian oil painting.

The theft, at the height of the Greek debt crisis, was followed a few months later by another high-profile robbery of nearly 80 archaeological artefacts from a museum in Olympia dedicated to the ancient Olympic Games.

The items were recovered several months later.

The National Gallery holds a prominent collection of post-Byzantine Greek art, as well as a small collection of Renaissance works and some El Greco paintings. 

The paintings will be exhibited once again in the National Gallery, which opened in March after nine years and 59 million euros (£60 million) of renovation work that doubled its capacity, as part of celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of the Greek War of Independence in Athens.