A dramatic jewelry heist straight out of Ocean’s 8 just took place in Germany.
Police are still searching for thieves who stole several pieces of priceless jewelry from a display case in the Dresden Royal Palace’s Green Vault early Monday morning, Saxony police said in a statement.
“The perpetrators first destroyed a window grille of the building in the direction of Sophienstraße,” police said in the release. “Then they destroyed the underlying glass element and penetrated into the rooms. Afterwards they destroyed with an ax a showcase, which stood in the so-called Jewel room. As a result, they stole out of this several jeweled gems. In total, the act took only a few minutes.”
Footage shared by the police shows one of the burglars caught on the vault’s surveillance cameras entering with a flashlight and carrying an axe, which they then used to smash the display case’s glass several times before it finally broke.
While only one burglar was caught on camera, police suspect there were multiple people involved in the crime.
An electrical distribution center located near the palace caught fire even earlier Monday morning, causing the lights to turn off and the alarm system at the museum to deactivate, The Guardian reported on Monday.
Zwischenzeitlich hat die Polizeidirektion #Dresden auch Bilder zu einem Teil der gestohlenen Schmuckstücke aus dem Museum #GrünesGewölbe veröffentlicht: https://t.co/b6a1Lcx1EY pic.twitter.com/jpwrseePuD
— Polizei Sachsen (@PolizeiSachsen) November 25, 2019
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And though guarded 24 hours a day, guards stationed at the museum did not intervene because they are unarmed, Director of Dresden’s state art collections Marion Ackermann told CNN, saying that the security team followed safety protocol.
Police arrived within minutes of news of the robbery, around 5 a.m. local time, but the thieves escaped in an Audi A6, police said in their statement. Later in the day, an identical car was found in an underground car park, set on fire, police said.
Twenty criminologists have been assigned to investigate the robbery in a special commission named “Epaulette.”
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The first public museum in Europe, the Green Vault is home to hundreds of historic artifacts — including the Dresden Green, a 41-carat diamond that is currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City, according to CNN.
Ackermann told The Guardian that it’s impossible to give a definitive monetary worth to the stolen pieces, which are hundreds of years old and included a string of pearls, a jewel-encrusted sword hilt and various other diamond-covered items.
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“We cannot give a value because it is impossible to sell,” said Ackermann. “The material value doesn’t reflect the historic meaning.”
Ackermann told CNN that the pieces were not insured because they are owned by the state of Saxony.
Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer condemned the robbery in a tweet on Monday, writing, “Not only the state art collections were robbed, but we Saxons! One can not understand the story of #Saxony , without the #green vault . The values found here have been hard-won by the people of our Free State for many centuries.”
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