Perhaps the largest in history .. German police chasing two thieves stole jewelry worth one billion dollars

Police in the western German city of Dresden are hunting for a robbery of more than $ 1 billion worth of jewelery at the Grunis Gewolbe Museum in the early hours of Monday.

German media say diamonds, rubies and emeralds belonging to the early 18th century were stolen by two men who stormed the museum through a window after the power was cut, then smashed three display cabinets and took jewelry they had stored, according to security camera footage.

Dresden police, who began a manhunt to arrest the thieves, said that the theft of jewelry took only a few minutes.After five o'clock in the morning, the public lighting in the area where the museum is located was extinguished, after one of them set fire to a power supply box.

Sequence of events
At 4:57 a.m., the thieves entered and took over the jewelry exhibition hall within a minute. The next minute, the security guard who watched the museum watched what happened in the surveillance camera, informing the police who were present at five and nine minutes. Thieves.

At 5 and 9 a.m., 16 police cars wandered around Dresden looking for criminals believed to be in an Audi A6 sedan. Six minutes later, police found the car burning in an underground garage.

According to Bloomberg, the government of Saxony, where Dresden is located, is the owner of the stolen museum. German authorities have not insured the jewelry, which museum director Marion Ackerman called "priceless" and impossible to sell on the open market.

The state's Prime Minister Michael Kritcher - in a press statement - that the stolen holdings "without them can not understand the history of Germany."

Previous thefts
The robbery of the Grunis Gevolbe Museum is one of the largest in history. Thieves had stolen diamonds inside the Millennium Dome in the British capital in 2000 worth $ 700 million. The French city of Cannes, worth an estimated $ 136 million.

It also occurred in the mid-1990s and in the past years, theft of jewelry worth tens of millions of dollars, but much less value compared to the value of the loot of the German Museum.