‘Amateurish’ thieves steal 2 Warhol prints, damage 2 more in botched heist at Dutch gallery

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Thieves blew open the door of an artwork gallery within the southern Netherlands and stole two works from a well-known sequence of display prints by American pop artist Andy Warhol and left two extra badly broken on the street as they fled the scene of the botched heist, the gallery proprietor mentioned Friday.

Mark Peet Visser mentioned the thieves tried to steal all 4 works from a 1985 Warhol sequence known as “Reigning Queens,” which options portraits of the then-queens of the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, a small landlocked kingdom in southern Africa which is now known as Eswatini.

In a phone interview, Visser mentioned the heist early Friday at MPV Gallery within the city of Oisterwijk was captured on safety cameras, and known as it “amateurish.”

“The bomb assault was so violent that my whole constructing was destroyed” and close by shops have been additionally broken, he mentioned. “In order that they did that a part of it nicely, too nicely really. After which they ran to the automotive with the artworks and it seems that they received’t match within the automotive. … At that second the works are ripped out of the frames and also you additionally know that they’re broken past restore, as a result of it’s unimaginable to get them out undamaged.”

Visser declined to place a worth on the 4 signed and numbered works, which he had deliberate to supply on the market as a set at an artwork honest in Amsterdam later this month.

The thieves bought away with portraits of Elizabeth II of the UK and Margrethe II of Denmark. The prints of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntombi Tfwala, who’s now often called the queen mom of Eswatini, have been left on the road because the thieves fled, Visser mentioned.

Police appealed for witnesses as forensic specialists examined the badly broken gallery on Friday.