Swedish police arrest 5 in art theft

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Police have arrested five men in the theft of three Renoir and Rembrandt paintings from Stockholm's waterfront National Museum, but the precious art works remain missing, authorities said yesterday.

Four of the men were arrested Wednesday and yesterday morning in the Stockholm area, police superintendent Leif Jennekvist said.

A fifth man was arrested before midnight yesterday, and police were searching for one more man, police spokesman Kenneth Karlsson said. All the arrested men were Swedes.

The paintings were taken from the museum Dec. 22. A man walked into the state-run museum five minutes before closing time and pointed a submachine gun at an unarmed guard while two people already inside snatched the paintings off the walls.

The latest suspect arrested was "involved in the deal, but we are not sure which are the three who stole the paintings," Karlsson said.

Police believed the paintings were still in Sweden.

"We think that we are going to get them back, but we cannot say when," Jennekvist said. He declined to elaborate.

Museum officials reacted to the arrests with cautious optimism.

"Naturally we are happy if this means that the case is about to be solved, but we don't know how the police investigation is being conducted," museum spokesman Torsten Gunnarson was quoted as saying by the Swedish news agency TT.

The robbers sped away in a boat moored near the museum. Police found the boat but not the paintings, which museum officials say are worth several million dollars.

Earlier this week, police said they had received several photos of the paintings along with a demand for an unspecified ransom for their safe return. Police said officials would not pay a ransom.

The paintings are:

n A self-portrait by Rembrandt, painted on golden-surfaced copper plate to give a special light to the face. It was painted in 1630.

n "Conversation," by Renoir, a close-up of a man and a woman with her back turned to the viewer.

n "Young Parisian," by Renoir, a painting of a young girl.

Like other government property in Sweden, the paintings were not insured. The National Museum's collections contain about 15,000 paintings and sculptures.

Meanwhile, police said yesterday that a bronze statue of movie legend Charlie Chaplin has been stolen from a museum in the Swedish city of Uppsala, 40 miles north of Stockholm.

The 10-inch statuette was made in 1942 by Swedish artist Bror Hjorth (1894-1968), who is more famous for his colorful paintings. The value of the statuette was not immediately known.

Police said the statue was probably stolen on Wednesday. The museum, founded 10 years after Hjorth's death, is located in his old house.

The biggest art theft in Sweden happened at Stockholm's Modern Museum in 1993, when works by Picasso and Georges Braque then worth about $53 million were stolen. In 1995, three Swedes were sentenced to prison in that theft, and all but one of the works were retrieved. Braque's painting "Still Life" remains missing.