It was a daring daytime heist involving crown jewels, a cathedral, a speedboat, and little in the way of clues, at least so far. "It's 1-0 to them right now," the BBC quotes police rep Thomas Agnevik as saying about the men behind the theft of some of Sweden's royal jewels. They were taken Tuesday from Strängnäs Cathedral, in the town of the same name near Stockholm. Police say two crowns made of gold, pearls, and jewels and an orb that were part of the 17th-century funeral regalia of Sweden's Charles IX and Kristina the Elder were lifted around noon, with witnesses describing two men fleeing and then taking off in a speedboat on Lake Malaren. The Guardian reports that's the country's third largest lake and sits "a couple hundred meters" from the cathedral.
"It's simply not possible to sell these kind of items. So you can only wonder what their intentions are, and how much they know about these crowns," a rep with the Swedish Police National Operations Department says, per the
Local. Agnevik echoes that: "What usually happens with this type of object is that they are recovered sooner or later, because there are very few people who are prepared to handle such items. We have high hopes of getting them back." King Charles IX died in 1611; his wife died in 1625. The two are buried in the cathedral, per
Deutsche Welle, and
Quartz adds that they were interred wearing the crowns, which were later exhumed and displayed in the glass cases broken by the thieves. (An arrest was made earlier this year
in England's biggest burglary ever.)
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