Curious case of a 48-hour art heist

IT'S a Sunday morning, just before noon, and staff at Manchester's Whitworth Art Gallery are about to open up for the day when a barely believable discovery is made.

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In the Margaret Pilkington room, there are empty spaces on a wall where three works of art should be - one each by Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Paul Gaugin. The three pieces, worth an estimated total of £4m, are gone - frames and all.

The gallery is shut, the police are called, and a hunt for the artworks, and thieves, begins.

As it transpires, the search for the art does not take long. The thieves, however, remain unidentified more than 20 years on.

The mystery begins at some point between 9pm on Saturday 26 and noon on Sunday 27 April, 2003. The raiders enter the gallery, on Oxford Road, by forcing open steel-covered doors at the rear before turning into the Pilkington room and carefully unscrewing the two nearest pictures, along with a third at the end of the wall.

They then escape, undetected by security and CCTV, with the pieces - Van Gogh's The Fortifications of Paris with Houses, Picasso's Poverty and Gauguin's Tahitian Landscape.

After horrified staff discover the theft, Greater Manchester Police are called to the scene at 12.30pm on the Sunday and spend the day combing the gallery for evidence, discovering several other items also missing. They later tell the media the raid was "well planned".

However, a little over 12 hours after being alerted to the theft, at 2am the following Monday, GMP takes a call from an anonymous woman with a tip-off. She directs them to a boarded-up, graffiti-strewn public toilet in Whitworth Park, 200m away from the gallery.