Gold treasure looted in 'super-fast' raid on Spanish museum

French authorities detained suspects in connection with the theft of precious jewellery from the world-famous Louvre museum in Paris. In the latest heist, a gold collection thousands of years old was taken in a lightning-fast raid from a Spanish museum.

Madrid, Spain - Thieves on Thursday raided the Treasure of Villena -- one of the greatest bronze-age gold collections -- in the latest high profile heist on a European museum, officials said.

A spokesman for the council in the Spanish town of Villena said it was not immediately known how many of the 50-plus mainly gold objects in the collection were taken as police were still making an inventory.

The raid lasted just minutes. "The alarm at the Villena Museum went off around 5:20am," said the spokesman, adding that by 5:24am the thieves had already left the building.

The operation was "super-fast and super-professional", the spokesman said.

The 29 bracelets, 11 bowls, three bottles, and other miscellaneous pieces in the Treasure of Villena are kept in a small museum in the Alicante province town.

Though mainly of gold, there are also pieces of silver, iron and amber, dating back to about 1,000 BC. The treasure was discovered in 1963 by archaeologist Jose María Soler in a vessel sunk in a dried out riverbed in Villena.

"All security systems were activated," according to the Villena spokesman, who insisted there had been "no failure" by the museum.

Shortly before the robbery, another alarm went off at the city's sports centre and authorities were investigating whether that was a diversion created by the thieves, the spokesperson added.

Last October, thieves broke into the Louvre museum in Paris in broad daylight, escaping in less than eight minutes with jewellery worth $102 million ( R1.63 billion). There have since been a series of brazen raids at institutions across Europe.

Four works "of extraordinary value" by Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina were stolen from a museum in Sicily, Italy's culture ministry said Sunday.

Two days earlier, Italian police said they had recovered paintings by Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse worth over $10.4 million, which were stolen from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation museum near Parma.