Three stolen Munch works found

Police recovered three pictures by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in a raid yesterday a day after they were stolen from a hotel but his iconic work The Scream, taken in a separate theft last year, was still missing.

"Several people have been arrested... some are Norwegian and others have a foreign background," Oslo assistant police chief Iver Stensrud told NRK television after a police raid in the Oslo area yesterday night.

He said police had recovered a 1915 Munch watercolour, Blue Dress, and two lithographs - a self-portrait and a portrait of Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg. It was unclear if they had been damaged, Mr Stensrud said.

He said that it was impossible to say if the thieves were linked to those who stole The Scream, showing a terrified waif-like figure under a blood-red sky, and Madonna from Oslo's Munch Museum in front of dozens of tourists last August.

But he reiterated police were confident of solving that theft too.

Hotel owner Widar Salbuvik said Sunday's robbers seemed amateurish. The stolen pictures were not even among the most valuable in the collection of 400 works ranging from Munch to Andy Warhol, he said.

Armed with a crowbar, two men broke into the country hotel south of Oslo and tore the three works off the walls and ran off after a worker in the Refsnes Gods hotel surprised them.

Blue Dress, depicting a blonde woman, had been hanging in the hotel restaurant, which had just shut.

Art experts said the works snatched on Sunday were minor compared to the 1893 The Scream and Madonna.

"This is not a national catastrophe," Knut Forsberg, managing director of Blomqvist art auctioneers in Oslo, said of Sunday's theft.

He estimated that Blue Dress was worth perhaps one million crowns ($160,800), the Munch self-portrait about 300,000 crowns and the portrait of Strindberg up to about 200,000 crowns. Munch made dozens of copies of lithographs but did not number them.

By contrast, other experts have estimated The Scream might fetch $75 million if it could be sold at auction and Madonna, showing a raven-haired woman, might be worth $15 million.