In a brazen robbery, two men stole a diamond necklace once owned by an Egyptian queen from a museum in Vienna, the Austrian police said, adding that they were searching for the thieves.
The men smashed a display case and took the necklace on Thursday afternoon, the police said in a statement, and they then “fled with the jewelry in an unknown direction.”
The Museum of Applied Arts, where the theft occurred, said in a statement that the item was taken from an exhibition of works by the French luxury jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels.
One of the thieves was armed, the museum said, although it did not specify with what, and no one was harmed. The museum’s surveillance system recorded the thieves, museum officials said, and the police described the robbers as two slim men with dark hair and short beards.
The platinum-and-diamond necklace, which dates to at least 1939, was once owned by Queen Nazli, the second wife of King Fouad of Egypt. She was stripped of her royal status in 1950 by her son, King Farouk, because she supported her daughter’s secret marriage in San Francisco to a Coptic Christian diplomat. By then, she and her daughter were living in the United States.
A military coup overthrew King Farouk in 1952, and a year later Egypt’s new authorities seized the former royal family’s property. (The deposed king died in 1965, aged 45, after collapsing at a restaurant north of Rome, where he was living in exile.)
The former queen and her daughter lived first in mansions in Beverly Hills and Hawaii and then in an apartment in West Los Angeles. They were trailed by debt, and in 1976 the former queen’s jewels were put up for sale in a Los Angeles bankruptcy court. Nazli died in Beverly Hills two years later, at 83.
The necklace, part of an exhibit scheduled to run through September, wound up among the holdings of the auction house Sotheby’s, which in 2015 estimated it was worth between $3.6 million and $4.6 million.
“The theft of a high-value piece of jewelry by Van Cleef & Arpels has hit us hard,” the museum’s general director, Lilli Hollein, said in a statement. “Especially considering the incidents at major museums in recent years, we took this as an opportunity to thoroughly review our own security measures at the museum in general.”
Thieves have targeted several high-profile European museums since last fall, stealing jewels during an extraordinary heist at the Louvre in Paris, paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Antonello da Messina from museums in Italy and gold and silver Bronze Age objects from a museum in Spain.
“Even with comprehensive security measures in place, a targeted, armed attack during ongoing exhibition operations cannot be completely ruled out,” Ms. Hollein said.
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