Munch's priceless painting, The Scream, stolen in Norway last year, may have been destroyed, writes Kris Hollington
At about 8am on April 5th, 2004, a man drove a large white van in front of the police station in Norway's cathedral city of Stavanger. Another man got out of the cab, walked to the main door holding a canister of tear gas, pulled the pin and threw it inside. The two men drove off in a passenger car, the van bursting into flames as they fled.
At that same moment, the police started receiving calls of a robbery in progress at the offices of Norsk Kontantservice (Nokas), a cash transport service in the basement of Norway's central bank. Five men wearing black overalls, gas masks and helmets had entered the building carrying bags stuffed full of equipment. Another three, armed with automatic weapons, had taken up strategic positions at the junctions of two nearby streets.
Two patrol cars were dispatched to the scene. As the police arrived, the robbers opened fire, forcing commuters to run for their lives. Norwegian police need special permission to carry guns that are kept locked up in police stations. But one of the officers, Arne Sigve Klungland (53) happened to have a revolver in the car's safe and returned fire, hitting one of the gunmen. Not seriously injured, the gunman raised his machine gun and sprayed Klungland's car with bullets, fatally wounding him. At 8.20am, one of the robbers took a hostage - without realising it was a plainclothes policeman.
Inside the bank, the gang used sledgehammers and a variety of other tools to gain access to the Nokas offices. This took nearly 15 minutes but the police were unable to make use of this time to dispatch armed officers because of the burning van in front of the station. At 8.40am, the robbers crashed through the doors of the bank and spilled into the street. They drove out of the city at speed, firing wildly as they went. At about 9am, thick black smoke was spotted rising from the edge of a forest two kilometres from the centre of town. The getaway cars were still ablaze as police entered the forest but the robbers were gone. Their prize: €7.48 million in untraceable cash.
Only seven police officers have been killed on duty in postwar Norway. The country's special organised crime unit, Catch, and special police force, Kripos, were instructed to drop all other cases. The director of Police, Ingelin Killengreen, said every policeman in Norway would be put on the case. And then, a few weeks later, another robbery took place that changed police priorities.
On August 22nd, 2004, at the Munch Museum in Oslo, two thieves, wearing hooded tops and balaclavas, ran straight into a plate-glass sliding door. Startled museumgoers watched as they picked themselves up, waited for the door to slide back and tried again. Once inside, they turned right, then left, then left again. Realising they should have gone right, they doubled back and finally arrived in the central room of the museum where their iconic target was hung.
The Scream by Edvard Munch is a symbol of Expressionist angst, showing an individual on a bridge, hands clasped around their head and mouth wide open, howling despair at the viewer. One of the most famous paintings in the world, it is said to reflect Munch's existential despair after the early deaths of his mother and elder sister. It is widely considered to be priceless.
One robber held a gun to the head of a terrified security guard while the other tore the painting from its mountings. On the way to the exit, the thieves stopped and tore down another Munch painting, The Madonna. As they fled, they ripped the wooden frames off to remove electronic tracking devices. The Scream, painted on cardboard, was badly damaged in the process.
Despite the bungled start, the heist had taken just a few minutes. A national outcry followed. One newspaper carried the headline, "The world screams". The press were severely critical of museum security and derided the police for failing to make a quick arrest. Just as he did a month before, Killengreen said that every available policeman would be put on the case in an effort to ensure the quick return of the painting.
Could the two heists have been connected? The hunt for those responsible for the Nokas robbery had proven only partly successful. By July, seven arrests had been made, in Norway and elsewhere in Europe, but 28-year-old David Toska, who is later said to have confessed to being the ringleader, remained elusive. Meanwhile, in the hunt for The Scream, police had a clear target: Paal Enger, an ex-professional footballer turned art thief with a Munch obsession.
Enger's criminal career had been nothing if not colourful. His first spell in prison was for stealing Munch's The Vampire. At the time, in 1988, Enger played for the Norwegian club Valerenga, but low wages meant most players had another career. Two of Enger's teammates were policemen who noticed that, despite not having a second job, he threw away brand new tracksuits at the end of each training session, claiming they weren't worth washing. Intrigued, they followed Enger through Oslo and watched as he spent large sums on watches, clothes, restaurants and holidays. They soon discovered that he was a thief, mainly stealing jewels and cash. When police raided his home, The Vampire was found hanging on his wall.
After Enger was released in 1994, he returned to crime and, later that year, was given an unusual commission: to steal The Scream. He would be well paid and his mystery employer didn't even want the painting - Enger could do what he liked with it. Enger gladly accepted and hired three accomplices. They broke into Oslo's National Gallery on the night the national attention was distracted by the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics, held that year in Lillehammer, Norway. After stealing the masterpiece in less than a minute, Enger left a postcard which read: "Thousand thanks for the bad security!" An incurable show-off, Enger helped draw suspicion to himself by boasting in a newspaper birth notice that his baby son had arrived "med et Skrik" - with a scream. Police hired a British art recovery expert, Tony Russell, who helped put together a sting when Enger tried to ransom the painting for €1.04 million. He was captured during the handover in a small town near Oslo and the painting was recovered undamaged. He was sentenced to six-and-a-half-years.
Later, police learned that the unnamed instigator of the Scream raid was, in fact, a member of the "Tveita Gang", a group of armed robbers whose activities had been severely curtailed by a police crackdown. The theft of The Scream was supposed to take the heat off them - and it worked. They successfully raided several banks in the weeks following the theft.
As police considered the second raid they became convinced that Toska had commissioned it. Iver Stensrud, the head of the organised crime unit of Oslo police, who is leading the inquiry into the recovery of the pictures, said: "You can't sell The Scream, it's impossible." And while they gave all their attention to The Scream, Toska slipped out of Norway. He made his way to Madrid, and is believed to have hooked up with a Norwegian hashish smuggler.
In April the pair were arrested in a hotel room in Malaga, and Toska allegedly confessed to having orchestrated the Nokas robbery, also giving police vital evidence that confirmed their suspicions about who had taken the painting. Enger, who had already been questioned in November, was finally taken into custody in May. He denies any involvement in the crime. There are now five suspects in custody in connection with the August 22nd robbery.
As for the paintings, their whereabouts remains unknown. Fears are mounting that they may be irretrievably damaged. Reports in the Norwegian daily VG cite criminal sources claiming that both paintings were incinerated by the thieves because they thought police were getting too close. Police offered a two million kroner (€253,000) reward for information leading to their recovery.
The beleaguered Munch Museum, closed since November, reopened to the public on June 18th, including among its displays a pastel version of The Scream and a lithograph of The Madonna. It has had a €6.42million security upgrade, designed to fox even the most well-prepared art thieves. - (Guardian Service)
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