£30 Million Rio Art Heist

Crowds taking to the streets in masks and fancy dress in Rio de Janeiro provided perfect cover for gunmen to make off with some of Brazil's most treasured paintings in an audacious robbery. They stole works by Monet, Matisse, Picasso and Dalí, worth a total of £30 million, from the Chacara do Ceu museum on Friday night before vanishing among the revellers. At least four gunmen were involved in the heist, she said, one of whom had threatened staff and visitors with a hand grenade and had robbed five tourists into the bargain. Two museum guards who resisted had been hit. The theft of the paintings is the latest in a string of meticulous art robberies in recent years. In August 2004, two masked men armed with machine-guns made their way through the crowds at a museum in Olso and stripped the wall of Edward Munch's The Scream, estimated to be worth £30 million. In 1997, one of Gustav Klimt's most famous works, Portrait of a Woman, valued at £12 million, was stolen from a museum in Piacenza, Italy. The thief used a fishing rod style device to hoist the painting through a skylight without activating the alarm. For the full story - click the title Irish Art