Vienna Museum Heist: Diamond-Studded Necklace of Egyptian Queen Stolen

Austrian police are searching for two men who stole a historic platinum necklace set with 673 diamonds from the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna. The 200-carat piece, valued at $4.3 million, was part of a major jewellery exhibition and was on loan from the collection of the Parisian house Van Cleef & Arpels.

Security footage shows the unmasked suspects buying exhibition tickets before shattering a glass display case with a hammer on Thursday afternoon, while the museum was open to visitors. Several witnesses were in the room at the time, but no one was injured. The men fled with the jewellery in an unknown direction, prompting a large-scale search involving police officers and tracking dogs across the city centre.

Investigators suspect the robbery may have been a "contract job" carried out for a criminal gang, according to local media reports.

The necklace originally belonged to Queen Consort Nazli of Egypt, who wore it to the 1939 wedding of her daughter, Princess Fawzia, to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then crown prince of Iran. The piece was previously sold at Sotheby's in New York in 2015 for $4.3 million.

The exhibition, which featured over 300 works from Van Cleef & Arpels alongside roughly 200 objects from the MAK's own collection, has been temporarily closed following the theft. A guided tour scheduled for Friday was also cancelled. The exhibition was due to run until 27 September.

The heist is the latest in a series of high-profile smash-and-grab thefts targeting cultural institutions across Europe. Recent incidents include a daytime raid on the Louvre in Paris, the theft of a prehistoric gold hoard in Spain, and the loss of Renaissance masterpieces from a museum in Messina, Italy. A Europol report published this month warned that such robberies are becoming increasingly violent, with perpetrators using firearms, axes, and explosives.