Two men smash a MAK case and leave Vienna with Queen Nazli's necklace

Two men bought tickets to Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts on Thursday afternoon, walked into the Van Cleef & Arpels exhibition without masks, smashed a glass case with a hammer and left with a platinum necklace set with 673 diamonds. Police say one of them carried what appeared to be a real firearm. No one in the room was hurt. The pair ran toward Stadtpark. By Saturday they had not been found.

The necklace was made in 1939 for Egypt's royal family. Queen Nazli wore it at the wedding of her daughter Princess Fawzia to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then crown prince of Iran. Van Cleef & Arpels calls the design a "triumph of white jewellery." Sotheby's sold it in New York in 2015 for $4.3 million. Austrian police and the museum have used a working value of more than $4 million, about £3 million or €3.5 million.

The stones weigh more than 200 carats. The setting is platinum. Those two facts, plus the royal provenance, are why a hammer and a ticket queue were enough to justify an international hunt.

How the theft ran

The time was about 2 p.m. local. The museum was open. Visitors and guards were in the gallery. A police spokeswoman told dpa it was understandable that security staff did not step in front of an armed man. The case was broken, the necklace taken, the exit made on foot. The museum said no one was injured.

Police released CCTV stills. The men are identifiable. They did not cover their faces. They stood in the ticket line like anyone else. That choice is now the main investigative fact. Investigators are processing forensic traces, the video and witness statements. As of 29 August the trail ended at the park.

The exhibition, titled "Glanzstücke," pairs Van Cleef & Arpels jewellery with objects from the MAK collection. About 500 pieces are on show, more than 300 from the Paris house and more than 200 from the museum. The run was due to continue into September. The smashed case is now an empty frame in that argument between jewellery and design history.

Why this piece

Queen Nazli's necklace is not an anonymous high-carat string. It is a documented royal commission from the year Fawzia married into the Pahlavi line. That wedding tied Cairo to Tehran for a generation. The object then moved through the private market until the 2015 Sotheby's sale. Putting it in a public gallery during opening hours, behind glass that a hammer can beat, is a conservation decision as well as a display one.

Museum thefts of this type have a pattern. Buy a ticket. Carry a tool. Move in daylight. Leave on foot into a crowded city. The Louvre and other houses have seen versions of it. What is specific here is the weapon and the refusal to hide faces. Police now have clear images and a short geographic window. They do not yet have the necklace.

What the museum is

The MAK sits on Stubenring. Heinrich von Ferstel designed the neo-Renaissance building between 1866 and 1871. It opened as the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry. The columned hall covers about 520 square metres. The institution's brief is applied art, the same territory as London's Victoria and Albert Museum, with a different display habit. The current show put a $4.3 million necklace in a case that did not survive a hammer.

Interior ministry and Vienna police statements have stayed factual: two men, tickets, hammer, possible firearm, flight toward Stadtpark, no injuries, hunt underway. The jewellery house has not, in the public reporting so far, announced a separate reward. Insurers will be in the file even if they are not in the press release.

Saturday's status is simple. The necklace is missing. The suspects are named only by description and by the stills. The exhibition continues around an empty case. The 1939 object that crossed from Cairo to New York to Vienna is now somewhere a two-man team could reach on foot from the Stubenring in the middle of a Thursday.