PARIS — Wearing ski masks and dark clothes, three robbers walked into a private museum in Zurich, Switzerland, shortly before it closed Sunday afternoon and in three minutes made off with four of its most valuable paintings, Swiss police said Monday. The works by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet are worth an estimated $163.2 million.
One of the robbers held museum employees at gunpoint, while the two others grabbed the Impressionist treasures, which were hanging next to each other in the large exhibition hall of the E. G. Buhrle Collection.
“These people knew exactly where to go,” Lukas Gloor, the museum’s director, said in a phone interview. “They entered the room with our most valuable paintings and simply emptied two walls.”
The robbers fled the lakeside neighborhood in a white van with a painting possibly sticking out of the back, said Judith Hoedel, a police spokeswoman. One of the three spoke German with a heavy Slavic accent, she said.
It was among the largest art thefts in European history and perhaps the most high-profile since Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” was stolen in Norway in 2004. Stolen were Paul Cezanne’s “Boy in the Red Waistcoat,” Edgar Degas’ “Ludovic Lepic and his Daughters,” Claude Monet’s “Poppy Field at Vetheuil” and Vincent van Gogh’s “Blooming Chestnut Branches.”
Police are investigating whether another theft last week in Switzerland of two paintings by Pablo Picasso are related to Sunday’s crime. Those paintings, “Tete de Cheval” (“Head of Horse”) and “Verre et Pichet” (“Glass and Pitcher”), were snatched from a small exhibition hall about 18 miles from Zurich.
