Two ticket-holders smash a case at Vienna’s MAK and take a 673-stone necklace

Two men bought tickets to the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna on Thursday afternoon, walked into the Van Cleef & Arpels exhibition unmasked, smashed a display case with a hammer and left with a platinum necklace set with 673 diamonds. Vienna police said one of them carried what officers believe was a real firearm. Guards and other visitors were in the room. No one was hurt. The pair ran toward Stadtpark, just south of the museum on the Ring. An international search is under way.

The necklace was made for the Egyptian 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. Van Cleef & Arpels has called the design a triumph of white jewellery. The stones total more than 200 carats. Sotheby’s New York sold the piece for $4.3 million in 2015. Police and the museum put the current value above $4 million, or about €3.5 million. The Austrian interior ministry released a photograph of the jewel and CCTV stills of the suspects.

The exhibition, titled Glanzstücke, pairs more than 300 Van Cleef objects with more than 200 works from the MAK collection and was due to run into September. Police spokeswoman Anna Gutt said the men posed as ordinary visitors, moved through the rooms and then broke the case. Investigators are taking traces, pulling video and speaking to witnesses. Because the men paid for tickets and did not cover their faces, the images are clear. That fact will help identification. It will not put the necklace back in the vitrine.

European museums have spent two years rewriting display rules after the 2025 Louvre jewel theft in Paris. Cases have been thickened. Patrols have been added. Insurance premiums have risen. Thursday’s method ignored most of that work. The thieves did not tunnel or climb. They stood in a ticketed room during opening hours and used a hammer and a gun. Security staff, Gutt said, could not be expected to block an armed man. That sentence will be read in every museum director’s office this weekend.

Recovery of named jewels after a smash-and-grab is uneven. Stones can be recut. Settings can be broken. A necklace this well published is harder to sell intact, which raises the risk that it will be broken for the market. Police have not said whether the piece was on loan from a private owner or from the jeweller. That detail decides who carries the insurance loss and who has standing to sue.

MAK sits at Stubenring 5 in a Heinrich von Ferstel building that opened in 1871 as the imperial museum of art and industry. It is a short walk from the Stadtpark U-Bahn and from several arterial roads. The escape route the police named is the obvious one. The open question is whether the two men had a car waiting, a border plan, or only a few minutes’ head start on foot. Until that is known, the useful fact is the one already on the record. They paid to get in.