A £30 million Vincent Van Gogh painting has been stolen from a Cairo art gallery, causing a leading investigator to question the security of the world's museums and art galleries.
Only a handful of Khalil Museum's nearly 50 alarms were working when thieves stole the Van Gogh painting, known as Vase and Flowers or Poppy Flowers, from the Egyptian gallery.
The theft took place just a matter of months after five works by artists such as Matisse and Picasso were stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. On that occasion a broken alarm system made life easier for the thieves to make away with EUR 100 million worth of art.
Art detective Charles Hill, the former head of the arts and antiques unit at Scotland Yard, said he was not surprised at all by the theft because of the lax security in galleries.
"If you just go back three months to Paris and the Museum of Modern Art, [we saw] the same sorry saga of no alarms, or few alarms, and cameras that don't work and on and on."
"It's a wearying saga where you think, why don't directors of museums and the boards of trustees take security more seriously?"
He said that the Cairo and Paris thefts are two prime examples of people being "indifferent to the need to protect their paintings".
Hill also speculated that somebody took advantage of “inside information” and the security problems in the Cairo museum.
Egypt's Deputy Culture Minister Mohsen Shalaan has been arrested by investigators in relation to the theft. General Prosecutor Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud Shalaan and four of the gallery’s security guards have been detained as the police investigate whether negligence and professional delinquency played a part in the theft, according to the Middle East News Agency.
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