Two unmasked men stole a diamond-encrusted necklace worth more than $4 million from Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in a brazen daylight heist on Thursday, triggering a manhunt by Austrian police.The suspects posed as visitors at a jewellery exhibition before smashing open a glass display case with a hammer and fleeing on foot towards a nearby park. Police released CCTV images of the two men and said one of the suspects was believed to have been carrying a firearm. No one was injured in the incident, CNN reported.
Necklace linked to Egyptian royalty
The stolen platinum necklace, designed by French luxury jewellery house Van Cleef & Arpels for Egypt’s Queen Nazli in the 1930s, features 673 diamonds weighing more than 200 carats. It has a six-carat central diamond surrounded by baguette-cut stones and hundreds of smaller diamonds arranged in a sunburst pattern.Queen Nazli, the wife of Egypt’s King Fuad I, commissioned the necklace along with a matching tiara for the 1939 wedding of their daughter, Fawzia. Nazli later sold the jewellery in the 1970s amid mounting debts after spending her final years in the United States.
Necklace fetched $4.3 million at auction
The necklace resurfaced at a Sotheby’s auction in 2015, where it sold for nearly $4.3 million. It was later loaned by Van Cleef & Arpels to MAK for an exhibition featuring more than 300 designs by the jewellery house alongside pieces from the museum’s own collection.Following the theft, the exhibition was briefly closed before reopening later on Thursday. By Friday, a blue panel had been installed over the damaged display case. Local media also reported that metal detectors had been installed at the exhibition as security was tightened.Austrian police said “extensive search operations” were underway, including the deployment of dog units, as authorities searched for the two suspects. Interpol has also added the stolen necklace to its database of stolen artworks.
