Burglars have stolen three diamond jewellery sets of 18th century from one of Europe’s largest treasure collections – the Dresden Green Vault in eastern Germany.
The stolen items included brilliant-cut diamonds that belonged to a collection of jewellery of 18th-century Saxony ruler, Augustus the Strong.
The historic sets consist of 37 parts each, reportedly worth over $1 billion and there are fears the thieves may try to break them up.
The dramatic heist took place at dawn on Monday, after a fire broke out at an electrical distribution point nearby, deactivating the museum’s alarm and plunging the area into darkness.
Despite the power cut, a surveillance camera filmed two men breaking into the Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault) at Dresden’s Royal Palace – home to around 4,000 precious objects of ivory, gold, silver and jewels .
Volker Lange, the head of Dresden police, said the thieves smashed a window and cut through a fence before approaching and breaking open a display cabinet in the Grünes Gewölbe’s Jewel Room in “a targeted manner”.
Officers were at the scene within minutes of being alerted to the robbery shortly before 5am local time, but the suspects had escaped.
A burning car found in Dresden early on Monday may have been the getaway vehicle, police said.
German media reported the losses from the burglary could run into the high hundreds of millions of euros, but the director of Dresden’s state art collections, Marion Ackermann, said it was impossible to estimate the value of the items.
“The items cannot be sold on the art market legally – they’re too well known,” she said.
