Platinum necklace with 673 diamonds, once owned by an Egyptian queen, stolen from Vienna museum

Two thieves have stolen a 200-carat platinum necklace studded with 673 diamonds from a museum in Vienna. According to police, the pair bought tickets to an exhibition on Thursday, smashed a display case with a hammer, and fled with the jewels in an unknown direction.

Although several visitors were in the room at the time of the theft, no one was hurt, according to The Guardian. Police later searched central Vienna with a police dog — security cameras had captured the suspects' faces, but the perpetrators have yet to be caught. Investigators suspect the thieves may have been hired by an organized crime group.

A necklace with a shah's history

Museum officials in Vienna said the stolen necklace was part of an exhibition dedicated to the work of French jewelers Van Cleef & Arpels, which featured more than three hundred pieces. The show was scheduled to run until September 27, but was temporarily closed following Thursday's theft.

The piece once belonged to Queen Nazli of Egypt, who wore it in 1939 at the wedding of her daughter Fawzia to Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, the future shah. In 2015, the necklace was sold at auction in New York for $4.3 million (roughly 89.4 million crowns).

A wave of museum robberies across Europe

In recent months, the number of thefts from major European museums has risen sharply. The most high-profile case was October's brazen daylight raid on the Louvre in Paris, where thieves made off with royal jewels worth €88 million (about 2.1 billion crowns) in just a few minutes.

On the same day as the Vienna theft, another robbery took place at a city museum in the Spanish town of Villena, where thieves made off with mostly Bronze Age gold artifacts whose exact value experts have been unable to determine.

According to a Europol report published on Monday, EU countries have recently seen criminals shifting toward "violent methods," which may point to the emergence of new criminal networks specializing specifically in cultural property theft. The agency noted that some of the arrested thieves had coordinated their actions only once and had been recruited through social media without any prior ties to one another — a marked departure from traditional structures operating under a single, permanent leader.

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Source: novinky.cz