Adoh! Reality- 
 The great French art heist

   

 

 

 

 

 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.
   
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