Art thieves stole works by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Amedeo Modigliani worth €500 million from a Paris museum
Here are details of some major art thefts:
April 1991 - In what was then billed as the world's biggest art robbery, 20 paintings, estimated to be worth €400 million, were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They were found shortly afterwards in an abandoned car not far away.
November 1993 - Eight works by Picasso and French cubist Georges Braque, valued at some €50 million, were stolen from Stockholm's Modern Museum. Some were recovered in the following months.
December 22nd, 2001 - Conversation and A Young Parisienne by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a self-portrait by Dutch master Rembrandt were stolen from Stockholm's National Museum. Conversation was recovered the following April.
December 7th, 2002 - Two Vincent Van Gogh oil paintings worth millions of euro were snatched by thieves in a daring robbery at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
August 27th, 2003 - In Scotland, thieves stole the Madonna With the Yarnwinder by Leonardo da Vinci. The work, painted in the early 16th century, was valued at about €40 million.
August 22nd, 2004 - Armed robbers stole The Scream from the Munch Museum in Oslo, the second time in 10 years that a version of the painting was stolen. Thieves also took Madonna by Munch. The paintings, from 1893, were recovered in August 2006.
February 26th, 2007 - Two Picasso paintings, identified by police as Maya a la poupee (Maya with doll), a 1938 portrait of his daughter, and Portrait de femme, Jacqueline were stolen from Picasso's daughter's house in Paris. The paintings were recovered in August.
December 20th, 2007 - In Brazil thieves stole Picasso's 1904 work Portrait of Suzanne Bloch, worth up to €40 million, and local painter Candido Portinari's 1939 The Coffee Worker, valued at about €4 million, from Sao Paulo's leading art museum. Both paintings were recovered the next month.
February 6th, 2008 - Two Picasso paintings worth several million dollars, the Tete de Cheval (Horse's head), from 1962, and Verre et Pichet (Glass and pitcher), from 1944 were stolen from a cultural centre in the eastern Swiss town of Pfaeffikon.
February 11th, 2008 - Four oil paintings by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet were stolen from the Buehrle Collection in Zurich. Two of the paintings, Poppies Near Vetheuil by Claude Monet and Blossoming Chestnut Branches by Van Gogh, were found in good condition on February 18th in a car in Zurich. They are worth an estimated €50 million. Cezanne's The Boy in the Red Vest and Degas' Viscount Lepic and His Daughters, worth a total of €140 million, are still missing.
December 30th, 2009 - A drawing by French impressionist Edgar Degas was stolen from a museum in the Mediterranean city of Marseille. Police said the pastel work, The Chorus, was worth an estimated €800,000.
January 1st, 2010 - Thieves have stolen about 30 paintings, including a work by Pablo Picasso. The haul, which also included a painting by post-impressionist Henri Rousseau, was worth about €1 million. The theft was at the house in the Provencal village of La Cadiere d'Azur.