A 200-carat platinum necklace containing 673 diamonds and once worn by an Egyptian queen has been stolen from a museum in Vienna in a smash-and-grab raid.
The police are searching for two suspects.
The men entered the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) on Thursday afternoon during opening hours, bought exhibition tickets and then smashed a glass display case with a hammer before fleeing with the necklace. No one was injured.
Austrian police released security camera images of the suspects and appealed to the public for information. Officers searched central Vienna with a tracking dog after the theft.
The necklace was part of a jewellery exhibition featuring more than 300 works by French luxury jewellery house Van Cleef & Arpels. Museum officials said the exhibition had been temporarily closed following the theft.
According to documentation for the exhibition, the necklace once belonged to Queen Consort Nazli of Egypt. She wore it at the 1939 wedding of her daughter, Fawzia, to Iran's then crown prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who later became shah. The necklace was sold by Sotheby's in New York in 2015 for $4.3 million.
The exhibition, which was scheduled to run until September 27, brought together about 200 rare objects from the museum's collection and the Van Cleef & Arpels patrimonial collection.
The theft comes amid a series of high-profile robberies targeting European cultural institutions. Thieves broke into the Louvre in Paris last October and stole crown jewels worth an estimated €88 million.
In Spain, thieves raided the Treasure of Villena, a major collection of Bronze Age gold artefacts, on Thursday. Earlier this month, four works by Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina were stolen from a museum in Sicily.
Europol said in a report this month that museum robberies in Europe are becoming increasingly violent, with criminals using weapons and tools including sledgehammers, axes and explosives.