Suspects arrested in chainsaw heist at French Renoir museum — stolen paintings still missing

Five suspects have been arrested in connection with the theft of paintings by Auguste Renoir from a French museum, nearly a month after the heist.

According to AFP, the suspects are accused of stealing two Renoir works — "Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano" (1910) and "Young Woman at a Well" (1886) — from the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer, a small town near Nice in southern France, on the morning of Sept. 8 (local time).

The group cut through a fence with a chainsaw, smashed a ground-floor window and broke in, making off with four paintings in total.

When police arrived at the scene, they abandoned two of the works and fled.

Regional newspaper Nice-Matin reported that two of those arrested are suspected of having directly stolen the paintings from the museum. It added that the two missing Renoir works have yet to be recovered.

The museum held 13 Renoir paintings along with sculptures, furniture and photographs. The two stolen works are part of the Musée d'Orsay collection in Paris and had been on loan to the museum.

The venue was converted into an exhibition space in 1960 from the final residence where Renoir lived until his death in 1919.

City authorities had initially valued the four stolen paintings at 9 million euros ($10.1 million).

Museums and galleries across France and the rest of Europe, home to many high-value works, have been on edge over art theft.

In March, paintings by Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse were stolen from a museum near Parma in northern Italy.

According to AFP and a police spokesperson at the time, four masked men broke into the Fondazione Magnani Rocca building.

The thieves forced open the main entrance, entered the French gallery on the ground floor and completed the theft in under three minutes. They escaped by crossing the garden and scaling a wall when the alarm sounded. The theft was not made public until a week after it occurred. The stolen works included Renoir's "Fish" (1917), Cézanne's "Still Life with Cherries" (c. 1890) and Matisse's "Odalisque on a Terrace" (1922).

The Fondazione Magnani Rocca was established in 1977 by Luigi Magnani, an art collector and critic of music and fine arts.

Police later recovered the stolen works at a suspect's apartment. Investigators described the case at the time as "a complex investigation."