Museum staff ‘devastated’ after drawings worth £500,000 stolen and destroyed

Museum staff are “devastated” after drawings worth £500,000 were stolen and destroyed, the director has said.

On Tuesday, Police Scotland said that at around 11.30pm on November 19 a silver Ford Transit was stolen from Heron Square in Livingston, which was later found burnt out with parts stripped.

Inside the vehicle were 1,742 Second World War-era technical drawings that belonged to the Royal Engineers Museum, based in Kent.

The drawings were brought to Scotland to be digitised by a third-party company.

The pieces included a collection relating to the design and construction of the D-Day Mulberry harbours, railways and bridging.

Museum director Rebecca Nash is hopeful some items may have escaped destruction, and said the museum was told it appears to have been a “random act of crimin