$50m Gogh painting is stolen
Cairo, Aug. 21: A priceless Vincent Van Gogh painting has been stolen from a Cairo museum in a brazen daytime theft, the culture minister, Mr Faruq Hosni, said on Saturday.
The painting, that Mr Hosni identified as Poppy Flowers, “was cut out of its frame in the Mahmoud Khalil museum after it opened in the morning,” he said.
Mr Hosni said employees of the museum, which also has works by Monet, Renoir and Degas, were being questioned and that measures were being taken at airports and ports to prevent the stolen painting being smuggled abroad.
A museum official, who declined to be named because of the ongoing investigation, said the painting was known “either as the Poppy Flowers or the Vase with Flowers.” Other museum officials were not available to comment because they were being questioned.
Police, who valued the painting at about $50 million, said they were reviewing security camera footage and dusting the crime scene for fingerprints.
The museum, in Cairo’s middle and upper-class district of Dokki, was once the palace of a 1930s parliamentarian of the same name who amassed a large and priceless collection of artworks.
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