Van Gogh painting remains missing

Egyptian police continues measures to find those who had stolen a Van Gogh painting, valued by some experts at $50 million, from a Cairo museum on Saturday.

The 12in-square painting of red and yellow flowers was cut from its frame at the Mahmoud Khalil Museum. Within hours, Egyptian ministers announced that it had been recovered in the hands of an Italian couple arrested at Cairo airport.

Egypt’s top prosecutor, Abdel Meguid Mahmud, told the BBC that the museum’s security system was nothing more than a “facade.” He said museum officials had been looking for spare parts to mend the system but “hadn’t managed to find them.” According to him, all the alarms at the museum and 36 out of 43 security cameras had been broken for some time.

Abdel Meguid Mahmud added that state prosecutors had issued a warning about the need to improve security at Cairo's museums after nine paintings of 19th Century Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ibrahim Pasha were stolen from the Muhammad Ali Palace last year.

The work, known both as Poppy Flowers and Vase And Flowers, was stolen from the same museum before, in 1978, in mysterious circumstances. Authorities recovered it two years later at an undisclosed location in Kuwait.