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.
The exhibition, which opened in June and was scheduled to run through September 27, has been closed indefinitely following the theft. The MAK told CBS it would not provide further details while the police investigation is underway.
Vienna police launched an extensive search for the suspects and were reviewing surveillance footage. Kronen Zeitung reported that investigators suspect the theft may have been a targeted job commissioned by a criminal group based in the Balkans, though police have not publicly confirmed that theory.
The theft recalls one of Austria’s most notorious museum heists. In 2003, Benvenuto Cellini’s gold-and-enamel Saliera, then valued at roughly €50 million ($58 million), was stolen from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum by a thief who climbed scaffolding and entered through a window. The work was recovered three years later.
The Vienna robbery also comes less than a year after the brazen theft of jewels from the Louvre in Paris. In October 2025, thieves broke into the museum’s Galerie d’Apollon and made off with eight pieces of the French crown jewels, including jewelry associated with Empress Eugénie and Queen Marie-Amélie. The haul was valued at roughly $102 million, though officials said the historical value of the objects far exceeded their market price.
