A gang described as professional art thieves stole three major paintings by the Impressionist masters, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne, from Rome's Modern Art Museum overnight, police said yesterday.
The Italian news agency ADN Kronos said it had received an anonymous telephone call suggesting a political motive for the theft.
"We will inform you of all our conditions, including political conditions, for the return of the Van Goghs and the Cezanne," the agency reported the caller as saying.
Three armed and masked men entered the museum's security control room at about 10.40 p.m. and overpowered three women guards, according to an initial police reconstruction of the raid.
After forcing the women to turn off the alarm system and tying them up, the men went straight to a room in the museum and helped themselves to The Gardener and The Woman from Arles by Van Gogh, and Cezanne's Le Cabanon de Jourdan (Jourdan's Cabin).
The three women were found bound and gagged in museum toilets.
"It was the work of professionals," the Rome police chief, Mr Antonio Pagnozzi, said. They took the video-cassettes from the museum's security cameras and the guard's walkie-talkies, he added.
The gang also took more than one million lire (£400) from a safe, before leaving some 50 minutes after they had arrived.
The alarm was raised after the owner of the museum bar noticed the main door to the building was open at about 1.30 a.m.
The paintings would be difficult to sell on the art market. The Women from Arles is a 60 by 50 centimetre (24 by 20 inch) unsigned oil on canvas portrait of a Madame Ginoux. She took care of Van Gogh in the southern French town of Arles after he suffered his first major bout of depression, in 1890.
It is one of three paintings of Madame Ginoux, but is regarded by critics as the best. The other two are in museums in Brazil and the Netherlands.
The Gardener portrays a sad-looking peasant wearing a straw hat. The unsigned 61 by 50 centimetre (24 by 20 inch) oil on canvas was created in the spring of 1889, when Van Gogh was convalescing in the southern town of Saint Remy. It has been in the possession of the Rome museum for several years.
The Cezanne painting, also known as House and Trees, is an oil on canvas 65 by 81 centimetre (26 by 32 inch) work painted in 1906, the year the artist died.