Two men stole a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars from Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) on Thursday, after entering the museum as ordinary visitors and smashing open a display case.
The unidentified men entered the MAK during opening hours and targeted the museum’s current exhibition of jewelry by Van Cleef & Arpels, the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung reported. The men smashed a glass case, grabbed the necklace, and fled. No one was injured.
Police said on Friday that the men had bought tickets to the museum, were not wearing masks, and were captured clearly on surveillance cameras. They used a hammer to break the display case before escaping, according to CBS News.
The stolen piece is a platinum Van Cleef & Arpels necklace set with 673 stones totaling more than 200 carats. It was created for Egypt’s royal family and worn by Queen Nazli in 1939 at the wedding of her daughter, Princess Fawzia, to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then crown prince of Iran and later the country’s last shah. The necklace sold at Sotheby’s New York for $4.3 million in 2015.
The necklace was included in “Glanzstücke,” an exhibition pairing jewelry from Van Cleef & Arpels with objects from the MAK collection. The show includes roughly 500 objects, with more than 300 of them from the French jewelry house and more than 200 from the museum’s holdings.
