Burglars have stolen three diamond jewellery sets of 18th century\u00a0 from one of Europe’s largest treasure collections – the Dresden Green Vault in eastern Germany.<\/p>\n
The stolen items included brilliant-cut diamonds that belonged to a collection of jewellery of 18th-century Saxony ruler, Augustus the Strong.<\/p>\n
The historic sets consist of 37 parts each, \u00a0reportedly worth over $1 billion and there are fears the thieves may try to break them up.<\/p>\n
The dramatic heist took place at dawn on Monday, after a fire broke out at an electrical distribution point nearby, deactivating the museum\u2019s alarm and plunging the area into darkness.<\/p>\n
Despite the power cut, a surveillance camera filmed two men breaking into the Gr\u00fcnes Gew\u00f6lbe (Green Vault) at Dresden\u2019s Royal Palace – home to around 4,000 precious objects of ivory, gold, silver and jewels .<\/p>\n
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 Gr\u00fcnes Gew\u00f6lbe\u2019s Jewel Room in \u201ca targeted manner\u201d.<\/p>\n
Officers were at the scene within minutes of being alerted to the robbery shortly before 5am local time, but the suspects had escaped.<\/p>\n
A burning car found in Dresden early on Monday may have been the getaway vehicle, police said.<\/p>\n
German media reported the losses from the burglary could run into the high hundreds of millions of euros, but the director of Dresden\u2019s state art collections, Marion Ackermann, said it was impossible to estimate the value of the items.<\/p>\n
“The items cannot be sold on the art market legally – they’re too well known,” she said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Burglars have stolen three diamond jewellery sets of 18th century\u00a0 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, \u00a0reportedly worth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":12175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1366,7,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe","category-lifestyle","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12176,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12174\/revisions\/12176"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}