Austrian police are searching for two men suspected of stealing a 200-carat platinum necklace adorned with 673 diamonds, which was on loan to a museum in Vienna and once belonged to the Egyptian royal family.
Authorities in the capital released photos of the suspects captured on security cameras during the robbery at the Museum of Applied Arts. The unmasked men bought tickets to the exhibition before smashing a glass display case with a hammer during opening hours on Thursday afternoon and running away with the diamond necklace.
“The perpetrators fled with the jewelry in an unknown direction,” police said. Officers were deployed across the city and used a sniffer dog to search for the suspects. The Kronen newspaper reported that investigators believed the men were probably carrying out “contract work” on behalf of a criminal gang.
The museum said the piece was stolen from a jewelry exhibit that had been on display since June, featuring more than 300 pieces by French designers Van Cleef & Arpels. No one was injured, although there were several witnesses in the room at the time.
The necklace belonged to Queen Nazli of Egypt, who wore it at the 1939 wedding of her daughter Fawzia to the then-crown prince of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who later became the Shah. The king of Egypt at the time was Faud I, who was of Albanian origin.
The necklace was sold by Sotheby's in New York in 2015 for $4.3 million. The museum said the exhibition brought together about 200 "unique and rare objects" from its collection and pieces spanning the Parisian jewelry house's 120-year history, from the Van Cleef & Arpels heritage collection.
European museums have been hit by a series of robberies recently since thieves broke into the Louvre museum in Paris on a sunny day last October and made off within minutes with crown jewels worth 88 million euros.
On Thursday in Spain, thieves raided the Treasure of Villena, a collection of Bronze Age gold objects described as one of Europe's most important prehistoric treasures.
This month, four of the most important works by the 15th-century Renaissance master Antonello da Messina were stolen during a national holiday from a museum in the Sicilian port city of Messina.
Two days ago, Italian police said they had recovered three paintings by French masters Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse, which were taken this year from a private museum near the northern city of Parma.
A report from Europol this month found that robberies at European museums are becoming increasingly violent, with thieves sometimes carrying guns, attacking staff and using hammers, axes and even explosives to take their intended loot. ©LAPSI.al
