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.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS