5 daring museum heists where priceless items have been stolen - from books to the Mona Lisa

The British Museum has sacked a member of staff after precious items worth millions of pounds has been reported "missing, stolen or damaged". 

Police are now investigating, as it is understood thousands of items were taken and the missing items were taken over a significant period of time. 

Some items ended up on eBay, being sold at less than their estimated value. 

The treasures dated from the 15th Century BC to the 19th Century AD, and none had been recently on display, being kept for primarily for academic and research purposes, the museum said. The majority of them were kept in a storeroom.

So what other high-profile thefts have there been? Here is what you need to know. 

The stolen books at London's Lambeth Palace Library 

Lambeth Palace is home to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and also has a historic book collection. 

In February 2011, a sealed letter, written by a former employee of Lambeth Palace Library who has died, revealed the whereabouts of many of the library's precious books.

Since the mid -1970s, staff had known that many books had been stolen, but they were not aware of the full extent of loss until the letter led them to the man's house in London.

The stolen books contained some 1,000 volumes, made up of 1,400 publications, many from the collections of three 17th century archbishops of Canterbury - John Whitgift, Richard Bancroft and George Abbot. It also included an early edition of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part Two, finely illustrated books - such as Theodor de Bry's America, which chronicles the earliest expeditions to the New World - and medical books, such as The French Chirurgerye.

"We were staggered," says Declan Kelly, director of libraries and archives for the Church of England. "A couple of my colleagues climbed into the attic. It was piled high to the rafters with boxes full of books. I had a list of 60 to 90 missing books, but more and more boxes kept coming down."

"The scale of the theft is quite extraordinary," says Robert Harding, director of Maggs Bros, a London rare book dealer to the BBC. "It's one of the biggest such thefts in recent decades."

Harding says that if undamaged, the copy of de Bry's America could be worth £150,000, while the Shakespeare would be worth about £50,000. He says others are also worth five-figure sums.

Staff were unsure how the man managed to get away with stealing so many valuable and large books. 

The robbery of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911

In September 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre Museum, Paris. 

It was taken by an Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia, who claimed to have stolen the masterpiece to return her to her native Italy. 

He was hired by the Lourve to make protective glass cases for some of its famous works. After hiding in a closet overnight, he simply removed the painting, hid it under his cloak. However, he then discovered the door was locked. He was stuck until a plumber passed by and opened the door with his key. 

It was 24 hours before anyone even noticed the Mona Lisa was missing, as artworks are often removed to be photographed or cleaned.

However, in stealing the painting, Peruggia launched the Mona Lisa into fame as it now become a household name. People would queue just to see the empty spot where she was.

It wasn't until two years later, as the police investigation dragged on - and where Peruggia was interviewed twice - that an art dealer in Florence received a letter from a man saying he had the Mona Lisa. It was signed “Leonardo”. The man was of course Peruggia who had the Mona Lisa hidden in a trunk in his apartment.

Peruggia, then 32 years old, was arrested and eventually sentenced to seven months jail.

The theft of the Scream in 2004

On 22 August 2004, two masked men stole The Scream #4. The two men entered Oslo’s Munch Museum armed with a .357 Magnum pistol yanked the art work off the wall, and also grabbed another Munch painting, Madonna, on their way out. A bystander outside the museum was able to photograph the thieves as they escaped to a waiting car. Witnesses to the crime stated that no alarms went off when the paintings were stolen and that they were only attached to the wall by wire.

Almost a year later, in April 2005, a suspect was arrested in connection with the theft. However, Oslo police indicated that they had not yet recovered the paintings and rumours surfaced the painting was burnt. More arrests followed and eventually six men faced charges related to the theft of the paintings but it still had not been located by authorities. In June 2005, Oslo’s city government posted an award of 2 million Norwegian krone for information leading to the recovery of The Scream. M&M, the candy maker, also announced that they would give 2 million M&M’s in exchange for the return of The Scream.

 In May 2006 three of the six arrested were convicted of the crime and were handed prison sentences. Bjørn Hoen was sentenced to seven years for planning the heist; Petter Tharaldsen was sentenced to eight years for driving the get-away car; Petter Rosenvinge was sentenced to four years for supplying the car. Furthermore Hoen and Tharaldsen were ordered to pay the astronomical sum of 750 million kroner, the estimated value of the paintings, to the City of Oslo; a symbolic sentence. Meanwhile, The Scream was still nowhere to be found.

Finally, on 31 August 2006, The Scream and The Madonna were recovered. The police have not released details as to how and where the pieces were found, but that they were in Norway and no reward had been paid to retrieve them. 

Spider-man thief who stole five masterpieces from a Paris museum in 2010

A burglar known as Spider-Man was jailed in Paris for eight years after he stole five paintings from the Musée d’Art Moderne. 

Vjeran Tomic and two accomplices were also fined €104m (£88.6m) over the theft of a Matisse, a Picasso, a Braque, a Léger and a Modigliani. 

Jean-Michel Corvez, 61, an antique dealer accused of ordering the heist, and Yonathan Birn, 40, a watch dealer who hid the paintings, were sentenced to seven and six years in prison respectively.

Tomic was accused of cutting through a padlocked gate and breaking a window to enter the gallery as three guards were on duty, but the paintings were only found to be missing from their frames the next day. The museum’s alarms had been awaiting repair for several weeks.

Tomic said he took the paintings because he liked them.

Athletically built and 6ft 2ins tall, Tomic gained his nickname by clambering into Parisian apartments and museums to steal valuable gems and works of art.

Prosecutors claim he was spotted by a homeless man as he roamed around the Musée d’Art Moderne in the days leading to the theft.

Police arrested Tomic after an anonymous tipoff and tracking his mobile phone.

Impressionist masterpieces taken in front of the public in 1985

The artwork that gave its name to the Impressionist art movement was stolen from Paris’s Musée Marmottan on 27 October 1985. 

They were taken in broad daylight, and those who took them bought tickets like everyone else. 

They took Claude Monet’s iconic 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise, along with works by Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Nine guards and 40 visitors were held at gunpoint, and the thieves worked quickly as witnesses got the impression they knew what they were doing. Although the nine stolen works were valued at $20 million, some said that Impression, Sunrise was priceless. In 1990, all nine works were recovered at a villa in Corsica, and seven people were arrested.

 A tip-off led to the arrest in Japan of a yakuza gangster named Shuinichi Fujikuma, who had spent time in French prison for trafficking heroin and was sentenced for five years. 

In prison, he met Philippe Jamin and Youssef Khimoun who were part of an art syndicate. Fujikuma, Jamin and Khimoun planned the Marmottan theft.

However, in Fujikuma's house, police found a catalogue with all the stolen paintings from the museum circled. Also found were two paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot stolen in 1984 from a museum in France. This led to the recovery of the stolen paintings in a small villa in Corsica in December 1990.