Two men smashed a Vienna case and took Queen Nazli’s 200-carat necklace

Two men walked into Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts as visitors on Thursday afternoon, smashed a glass case in the exhibition Glanzstücke and left with a platinum necklace of 673 diamonds weighing more than 200 carats. Police released photographs of both suspects in dark clothes. No one was hurt. The museum reopened the show on Friday.

The piece is a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace made for the Egyptian royal family. Queen Nazli wore it in 1939 at the wedding of her daughter Fawzia to Iran's then crown prince, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Sotheby's sold it in New York in 2015 for about $4.3 million. The MAK has shown more than 300 Van Cleef works since early June. The culture ministry's first public comment on Friday was relief that the room had been empty of injuries.

Austrian police said the pair used a weapon in some accounts carried by local papers; the official line from the museum was shorter: a case was broken, an object was taken, the investigation is open. Bloomberg put the working value at about $4 million.

A week of museum glass

The Vienna theft sits next to the Villena raid in Spain the same night, where three people took Bronze Age gold after a diversion at a sports hall. The methods differ. Villena was a dawn break-in timed against a second alarm. Vienna was a ticketed visit in daylight. Both ended with a case open and a famous object gone.

The MAK, opened on the Ringstrasse in 1871, is still running the rest of Glanzstücke. The necklace is now a police photograph.