Ozzy Osbourne and his wife, Sharon, were awoken at their country mansion early Monday by burglars taking jewelry, and a scuffle sent one of the intruders plummeting from a second-floor window, police said.
The burglary took place at about 4am in Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, a county bordering London, at the home of the former Black Sabbath frontman and current reality television star.
PHOTO: AP
The Osbournes were woken by the break-in and "a man" grabbed one of the burglars before the intruder broke free and jumped from a 9m-high second-floor window, police said. They would not say whether the unidentified defender was Ozzy, perhaps best known to audiences around the world for biting the head off a live bat on stage.
He and his wife are staying at the mansion while she appears on the British TV talent show The X-Factor. Their children were not in the house at the time. His daughter, Kelly, was in Vancouver, Canada, and his son, Jack, was in Los Angeles, police said.
Jay Marose, the family's spokesman in the US, said that he spoke to Mrs Osbourne on the phone on Monday night, and that neither she nor Ozzy had been hurt.
"Ozzy and Sharon were in the house. They were woken up by the incident eventually. My understanding is that the intruder was discovered in ... Sharon's dressing room," adjoining the main bedroom, Marose said.
He declined to say whether the man who struggled with the intruder was Ozzy.
Marose didn't know the value of the stolen jewelry, but said he was sure it has "financial and sentimental value."
One of the burglars wore a ski mask and used a ladder to climb into the second-floor room of the mansion where a "large amount of jewelry" was stolen, police said.
Both burglars apparently escaped in a van, and the man who jumped was probably injured by the fall, police said.
The break-in was the latest misadventure for the Osbournes, who were thrust back into the public spotlight following the success of their eponymous reality TV show.
Last December, Ozzy spent eight days in a coma after breaking his collarbone, six ribs and a vertebra in a quadbike accident at the Buckinghamshire estate.
Changes, his duet with daughter Kelly, topped the charts in the weeks following the accident as Ozzy made his recovery.
Sharon battled cancer last year, and she saw her US talk show axed earlier this year. But she has since bounced back as a judge on The X-Factor alongside Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell.
On Friday night, the couple appeared together on the British Broadcasting Corp's Children In Need show, an annual fund-raising charity extravaganza for disadvantaged children.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema