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By Shanila Kumaran
In the dead of Wednesday night, as the
Eiffel Tower cast its golden beam from
across the Seine, a man emerged from
the shadows to break into the Mus?e
d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Dressed
in black and with a mask covering his face,
he cut a padlock on the gate and smashed
a window to get inside. Once there, he set
to work
By the time museum guards noticed
something amiss, shortly before 7am, the
lone thief was long gone - and with him a
stunningly valuable haul of artworks worth
hundreds of millions of euros.
As French police began their effort to find
both the robber and the loot, the break-in
at the museum in western Paris was being
described as one of the biggest art heists in
recent history.
Five paintings, including Pablo Picasso's Le
Pigeon aux Petits-Pois and La Pastorale by
Henri Matisse, were taken from the galley's
permanent collection, located in one of the
richest parts of the capital, just south of the
Champs-Elysees.
Those two works alone are estimated as
being worth £20m and £13m respectively,
and, while the museum itself has suggested
that the stolen paintings are worth about
£86m, the Paris prosecutor's office has said
the total value could be five times as much.
"This is a serious attack on the heritage of
humanity," said Christophe Girard, deputy
culture secretary at Paris city hall, standing
on the steps of the museum amid a swarm
of television cameras. Listing works by
Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani and
Fernard Leger, Bertrand Delanoe, the city's
mayor, urged that everything be done "to
recover these masterpieces".
Girard said it remained unclear whether
the thief, who removed the paintings from
their frames and rolled them up to so that
they could be carried away easily, had been
acting alone or with a team. |