Two men bought tickets to the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, walked up to a display case and smashed the protective glass with a hammer

Two men bought tickets to the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, walked up to a display case and smashed the protective glass with a hammer. They pulled out a diamond necklace and vanished in an unknown direction. They made no attempt to hide their faces, so the surveillance cameras recorded them distinctly, and the police have already established a description of both.

The necklace was made by the house of Van Cleef & Arpels in 1939 to the commission of the Egyptian Queen Nazli. She presented it to her daughter, Princess Fawzia, on her marriage to the Iranian prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who became the last Shah of Iran. The craftsmen assembled the piece from platinum and 673 diamonds of a combined weight of about 200 carats. Sotheby's values it at 4.6 million dollars.

The necklace was on show at the exhibition Glanstucke, which opened in June and gathered some five hundred objects from the museum's collection and the archive of the jewellery house.

The plundered gallery was open to visitors again within a few hours. The broken case was covered with a blue panel, and no explanatory plaque was placed beside it. The administration declined to comment on the circumstances of the theft, citing the investigation.