It was regarded as one of the worst acts of anti-Semitic vandalism since the war. More than 320 bronze plaques, all giving names to faceless victims, had been ripped out of the cemetery adjoining the former Nazi camp of Theresienstadt.

Yesterday, however, Czech police called off their hunt for a group of neo-Nazi suspects —- and instead arrested a scrap dealer.

The plaques, it seems, were the latest booty in a new global crime wave.

Scrap metal prices have been soaring, largely because of the rapid industrial growth in China, and some experts blame the demand generated by the massive construction work for the Beijing Olympics.

The world market price of copper, used in the traffic and communications infrastructure for the Olympics, soared fivefold between 2001 and 2007.

Scrap thieves have resorted to ever more bizarre techniques to capitalise on the high prices. In February, a gang stole an entire four-tonne iron railway bridge near Cheb in western Bohemia, close to the Czech-German border.

“It must have taken two months to dismantle and nobody noticed,” Ladislav Boehm, a police investigator, said.

Bridge theft has not been confined to the Czech Republic. In the past year at least two have disappeared in Russia and in February thieves stole two in Macedonia.

Scrap metal prices usually rise and fall quite rapidly, making big heists a risky business. In the three weeks it takes to remove a kilometre of railway track the prices could drop so significantly that the thieves would find themselves without a market.

However, the Bureau of International Recycling in Brussels, which represents about 700 companies and associations, says that the gigantic investment in construction in China, India and other Asian states has kept prices unusually high.

The result can be seen in crime figures across the world —- from the theft of lead off British church roofs to manhole-lid robbery in Ukraine.

In the United States police have reported the theft of bronze urns from graveyards; while catalytic converters are being stolen from cars because they contain platinum, which is currently selling at an average of $1,900 (£950) an ounce.

Among the most intrepid scrap crimes was the removal from a museum in Ukraine of an entire steam locomotive, which was then taken apart, ready for sale.

Copper earthing cables and aluminium doors were stripped from dozens of power sub-stations in Brunei.

Scrap gangs have been profiting from the sub-prime lending crisis in the United States by identifying houses abandoned under foreclosure orders and ripping out the copper pipes and wiring.

It is often heavy work, conducted at night, so there have been several cases in Germany of thieves severely burning themselves on electric wiring or, in the Czech Republic, of accidentally blow-torching through a supporting pillar in a defunct steel plant and dying under the falling rubble.

The Theresienstadt theft highlighted the extent to which scrap gangs are now willing to go.

The bronze plates marked one of the most emotionally sensitive spots in the Czech Republic.

The Germans used Theresienstadt as a Gestapo prison for Czech resistance fighters and as a transit camp for about 142,000 Jews, 87,000 of whom ended in Auschwitz and other extermination camps.

Some of the plaques have now been recovered after the arrest of the scrap dealer.

The Czech authorities are replacing the signs —- but this time they will be made of synthetic resin.

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