Munch artwork stolen from Oslo gallery

Historien, a rare lithograph by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch worth €240,000 was stolen in Oslo, police said yesterday.

A man wearing "hip-hop clothes and a baseball cap" according to a witness, smashed the window of the Nyborg Kunst gallery in Oslo late on Thursday and took off with the work of art, the head of the organised crime unit for the Oslo police, John Roger Lund, said.

Police have found the thief's vehicle, which had been reported stolen 10 days before.

"This leads us to believe it was a well-planned robbery," Mr Lund said.

Several copies of Historien (which means history in Norwegian) exist, but the stolen one was unique in that it was hand-coloured by the pre-expressionist painter, who died in 1944.

The 57 x 98 centimetre work sold at auction in 2001 for 200,000 kroner, but is now believed to be worth two million kroner (€240,000).

"Because it would be extremely difficult to resell it, we are not ruling out this was a hit ordered by someone," Mr Lund said.

Munch artwork has been targeted before.

In 2004, two armed masked men burst into the Munch museum in Oslo in broad daylight and stole the Scream and also the Madonna paintings before making off in a getaway car driven by a third man.

Ten years earlier, another version of the Scream was stolen from Oslo's national gallery on the same day as the opening of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics.