Vienna museum diamond heist: Thieves steal Queen Nazli’s $4.3M necklace

The robbers, who didn’t disguise their faces and were caught on camera, remain at large with the 673-diamond necklace once owned by an Egyptian queen, police said.

Austrian police are searching for a pair of brazen thieves who made off with a diamond necklace — once owned by an Egyptian queen and worth millions — by smashing a display case at a Vienna museum in broad daylight.

But unloading the hot rocks stolen last week from the Museum of Applied Arts, known as MAK, could be their undoing, art heist experts said Monday.

“Just like with paintings, it’s hard to sell well-known pieces of jewelry,” said Anthony Amore, a Boston-based art theft expert and investigator. “The Catch-22 is nobody will buy it intact. So it would not surprise me if their aim is to take the piece apart and sell the jewels individually.”

Robert Wittman, who once led the FBI’s Art Crime Team and is now a security consultant, agreed.

“What I expect they aim to do is pop the diamonds out of the settings and melt it down,” he said.