Some 50 millions of dollars have been stolen from DAO token holders (including myself). The DAO is by the way, claimed to be closing [Tual]. Closing or not, it remains a smart contract which should allow DAO holders to get some of their initial ethers back.

Now can the thief spend his Ethers without being caught (for now locked until 14 July)? Or will community agree to simply invalidate these tokens (hard fork or/and a decision by 51% of ETH miners)?

A person claiming to be the thief himself have made a public statement explaining that [after consulting a law firm] given the DAO official rules, the money is rightfully theirs. The thief claims that the DAO was intentionally designed to allow this sort of action. Moreover he threatens legal action against Ethereum programmers or DAO curators, if they decided to invalidate his tokens. Lawyers don’t really agree: “code vulnerability doesn’t equal consent”, and “criminal laws may have been broken”.  

Now the thief [apparently a group of people] decided to oppose any such fork by another method: they announced that they will basically PAY the ETH miners to oppose the fork. They have lots of ETH to do so. It looks like some highly skilled gangsters are trying to see if it is possible to corrupt ETH community from the within and with cash. Will they succeed?