BERLIN: Robbers made off with three priceless diamond sets from a state museum in Dresden on Monday, police and museum directors said, in what German media have described as the biggest art heist since World War Two.

The thieves broke into the Green Vault at Dresden’s Royal Palace — home to around 4,000 precious objects of ivory, gold, silver and jewels — at dawn after a power cut deactivated the alarm.

The stolen items included brilliant-cut diamonds that belonged to a collection of jewellery of 18th-century Saxony ruler Augustus the Strong.

“We are talking here about items of inestimable art-historical and cultural-historical value,” the director of Dresden’s state art collections Marion Ackermann told reporters at a press conference on Monday.

“We cannot put an exact value on them because they are priceless,” said Ackermann, adding she was “shocked by the brutality of the break-in.” The thieves launched the brazen raid after a fire broke out at an electrical panel near the museum in the early hours of Monday, deactivating its alarm as well as street lighting, police said, adding that investigations were ongoing to determine if there was a link to the robbery.

Despite the power cut, a surveillance camera kept working and filmed two men breaking in.

They smashed a window and cut through a fence before making their way to a display case “in a targeted manner” and destroying it, the head of Dresden police Volker Lange said. They remain on the run.

Published in Dawn, November 26th, 2019