Police offer €500,000 reward over Dresden diamond heist

Investigators in Germany have offered a €500,000 (£426,000) reward for information about Dresden heist in which robbers snatched priceless diamonds from a state museum.

Police said the reward was being offered to anyone providing information “which could lead … to the capture of the perpetrators or the recovery of the stolen items”.

Police across eastern Germany are continuing their search for the thieves who carried out the raid on the Green Vault museum in Dresden’s royal palace on Monday.

Having initiated a partial power cut and broken in through a window, the thieves stole priceless 18th-century jewellery from the collection of the former Saxon ruler Augustus the Strong.

They stole objects encrusted with hundreds of diamonds, including the famous 49-carat Dresden white, the museum said on Wednesday. Eleven pieces were removed in the raid and parts of three other items are also missing. The Dresden white diamond was one of the most precious jewels in the collection. Tobias Kormind, the managing director of 77 Diamonds, a diamond retailer, said it could be worth £8m or £9m. “None of the diamonds would have been in themselves extra special except for the one large Dresden white,” he said.

The huge cushion-cut gem was made in the early 18th century and bought at great expense by Augustus the Strong, the Elector of Saxony, in 1728.

Police hunting four suspects in the theft have released CCTV footage showing one person breaking into a display case with an axe.

Aside from a burnt-out car identified as the initial escape vehicle, investigators are yet to find any significant trace of the thieves.

Dresden police said they were in contact with colleagues in Berlin to explore possible connections to a similar heist in the capital two years ago. A 100kg 24-carat gold coin was stolen from Berlin’s Bode Museum in that raid. Four men with links to a notorious Berlin gang were later arrested and put on trial.

On Thursday police said the Dresden investigations were now being led by the state prosecutor’s department for organised crime. The special commission set up to investigate the theft has doubled in size to involve a staff of 40.

“We will leave no stone unturned to solve this case,” said the regional police president Horst Kretzschmar.