Austrian police are hunting two men alleged to have stolen a 200-carat platinum necklace encrusted with 673 diamonds that was on loan to a museum in Vienna and once belonged to Egyptian royalty.
Authorities in the capital released pictures of the suspects captured by security cameras during the heist at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), amid a rash of spectacular smash-and-grab thefts from European cultural institutions.
The unmasked men bought tickets to the exhibition before shattering a glass display case with a hammer during opening hours on Thursday afternoon and making off with the diamond necklace.
In an appeal for information from the public, police said: “The perpetrators fled with the jewellery in an unknown direction.”
Officers fanned out through the city centre and deployed a police tracking dog to search for the suspects. The Kronen newspaper said investigators believed the men were probably carrying out a “contract job” on behalf of a criminal gang.
MAK said the piece had been snatched from a jewellery exhibition that had been on display since June, featuring more than 300 works by the French designers Van Cleef & Arpels. No one was hurt, although there were several witnesses in the room at the time.
Documentation for the show said the necklace once belonged to Queen Consort Nazli of Egypt, who wore it at the 1939 wedding of her daughter Fawzia to Iran’s then crown prince, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who later became shah. The necklace was sold by Sotheby’s in New York in 2015 for $4.3m.
The MAK said the exhibition brought together about 200 “unique and rarely seen objects” from its own collection and pieces spanning the 120-year history of the Parisian jewellery house, from the Van Cleef & Arpels patrimonial collection.
A guided tour planned for Friday afternoon was listed as “cancelled” on the museum website and the exhibition, which was due to end on 27 September, was temporarily closed.
European museums have been hit by a string of high-profile heists since thieves broke into the Louvre museum in Paris during the day last October and escaped within minutes with crown jewels worth €88m.
In Spain on Thursday, thieves raided the Treasure of Villena, a collection of bronze age gold artefacts described as one of Europe’s most important prehistoric hoards.
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 earlier, Italian police said they had recovered three paintings by the French masters Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse that were taken this year from a private museum near the northern city of Parma.
A report by Europol this month found that robberies at European museums are becoming increasingly violent, with thieves sometimes brandishing guns, assaulting staff and using sledgehammers, axes and even explosives to smash their way to targeted loot.
