It is 5:47 a.m. on February 12, 1994. Oslo is cold and dark, wrapped in a silence it rarely achieves. The city is, for once, distracted: in a matter of hours, the eyes of the world will pivot north to Lillehammer, where the 1994 Winter Olympics are about to open. Flags are out. Television crews are everywhere. No one is watching the National Gallery.

Two men are. One stands beside a van idling on Universitetsgata. The other leans a ladder against the stone façade of Norway's most important art museum. In less than 60 seconds — 50, according to police — they will have committed the most brazen art theft in Norwegian history. They smash a second-floor window. They climb inside. They cut the wire holding The Scream to the wall — the original 1893 version, Edvard Munch's tempestuous rendering of existential terror — and slide it down the ladder to the man waiting below.

Before leaving, they place a postcard on the empty hook where the painting hung. It reads: "Thanks for the poor security."

They were not wrong. The gallery's alarm had triggered, but by the time police arrived, the men were gone. A nation preparing to host the world had just lost its most iconic artwork.

The mastermind was Pål Enger — a former semi-professional footballer for Vålerenga, turned compulsive art thief. He was not a sophisticated fence with a black-market buyer. He was something weirder: a man with a specific obsession. Munch. He had already tried to steal The Scream in 1988, only to find the painting had been moved, so he grabbed Love and Pain instead — the painting nicknamed Vampire — and hid it in the ceiling of a pool hall frequented by off-duty police officers. He found the irony delicious. "We let them play for free," he later said in a documentary, "just to have them there."

Now, finally, he had the painting he actually wanted. And Norway was too busy celebrating the Olympics to notice.

The theft was a national scandal. Norway, already embarrassed that its most famous painting had been stripped off a wall in under a minute, grew more humiliated when the thieves demanded a ransom of $1 million. The National Gallery refused to pay. A Norwegian anti-abortion group complicated things further by claiming they could return the painting if state television aired an anti-abortion film. The police declined that offer too.

What followed was a months-long investigation that eventually went international. Norwegian police approached Charles Hill — a detective in the art and antiques unit of London's Metropolitan Police, one of the world's foremost authorities on stolen art. Hill agreed to go undercover, adopting the persona of "Chris Roberts," a slightly shady mid-Atlantic art dealer acting as a representative for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. His "minder" was, in Hill's own description, an English gangster living in Amsterdam.

The con worked. The sting operation brought in Scotland Yard's SO10 — the Covert Operations Group. Hill's buyers made contact with those holding the painting, agreed to a price, and set the exchange. On May 7, 1994 — just under three months after the theft — police recovered The Scream undamaged at a hotel in Asgardstrand, a seaside town about 40 miles south of Oslo.

Enger was convicted in January 1996 alongside three others and sentenced to six and a half years. But the story refuses neat endings: the British agents had entered Norway under false identities, and the convictions were overturned on appeal. Enger did serve time, then escaped from prison in 1999, granting television interviews while wearing a blond wig and dark sunglasses. He was recaptured after police noticed him wearing sunglasses at night. Later in life, he became a painter himself — exhibiting abstract works at a Norwegian gallery in 2011. He died in Oslo in June 2024, aged 57.

Norway, now fully embarrassed, upgraded the National Gallery's security. Museum directors exhaled. The nightmare was over.

It was not over.

Ten years later. A different museum. The same painting.

Edvard Munch produced four versions of The Scream: two in paint, two in pastel. The 1893 version — the one Enger stole — lives at the National Gallery. The 1910 tempera version lives at the Munch Museum, a dedicated institution in the Tøyen district of Oslo. Its value, by 2004, was estimated at over $100 million.

The Munch Museum knew about 1994. Everyone in the art world knew about 1994. And yet, in the summer of 2004, the 1910 Scream hung on the gallery wall attached, as witnesses would later confirm, by a wire. A single wire. You simply pulled it.

August 22, 2004. Shortly after 11:00 a.m. Oslo is bright and warm. The museum is open. Visitors are browsing. What happens next has the quality of farce compounding into horror.

Two men in hooded tops and balaclavas — armed with a .357 Magnum — run toward the museum's glass entrance. They run directly into the sliding door. They bounce off. They wait for it to slide open. They try again.

Once inside, they turn right. Then left. Then left again. According to The Irish Times, realising they have gone the wrong way, they double back, and finally arrive in the central room. One robber holds the pistol to the head of a terrified security guard. The other yanks The Scream from the wall — wire snapping clean — then grabs Madonna, another priceless Munch canvas, on his way out. They sprint for the exit.

French radio producer François Castang was in the museum that morning. "All you had to do", he later said, "is pull on the painting hard for the cord to break loose, which is what I saw one of the thieves doing." No alarms sounded. No barriers dropped. As the men fled outside, a bystander raised his mobile phone and photographed the thieves mid-escape, bundled paintings under their arms.

A short drive away, police found the thieves' abandoned black Audi. Inside: the paintings' empty frames. The men had sprayed fire extinguisher foam over everything to erase fingerprints and DNA — a thick white paste coating the interior. They knew exactly what forensics could do with surfaces.

They had done this before. Just not for art.

The investigation that followed was the largest surveillance operation in Norwegian history. Police tapped over 70,000 phone calls. They pursued hundreds of leads. They sat on CCTV footage frame by frame.

Lead detective Iver Stensrud — later assistant chief of police — became fixated early on a theory the media found improbable: that the Munch theft was not really about the paintings at all. It was a smokescreen.

Four months before the Munch robbery, Norway had been rocked by a crime that made The Scream heist look genteel. On April 5, 2004, a paramilitary-style gang stormed the NOKAS cash depot in Stavanger. They set a van on fire outside the police station, deployed tear gas, and used automatic weapons to seize 57.4 million Norwegian kroner — Norway's largest armed robbery on record. In the getaway, a police officer named Arne Sigve Klungland was shot dead — the first killing of a Norwegian police officer in over a decade. The nation was shaken to its core.

The alleged mastermind was David Toska — a 28-year-old chess champion from Bergen, described by investigators as one of Europe's most dangerous professional criminals. He had orchestrated multiple high-value robberies and built what prosecutors would characterise as a structured criminal enterprise. He had fled Norway and was actively being hunted. Stensrud suspected the Munch robbery was designed to drain police resources and divert attention from the NOKAS manhunt.

Then Stensrud paused the CCTV footage. He stared at the gloves the Munch robbers wore — specialist tactical gloves. He had seen those gloves before. In the NOKAS investigation, he had arrested the owner of a shop that supplied equipment to Toska's gang. The same gloves. That was not coincidence.

By September 2004, surveillance teams were tracking a suspect. On September 24, officers followed him to a farm and watched as he climbed onto an abandoned bus, reached under a seat, and pulled out a rolled carpet. Inside the carpet was a bin liner. Inside the bin liner were the paintings. Officers were barely containing themselves — then two cars appeared, both sped away in different directions, and the team had to choose one. They followed the wrong one. The paintings vanished again.

Months passed. Suspects were arrested. But none talked. In June 2005, the city of Oslo offered a reward of 2 million Norwegian kroner for information. The confectionery company M&M also announced 2 million M&Ms as an additional incentive. Nobody came forward. By now, rumours were circulating that the paintings had been burned by the thieves to destroy evidence. Norwegian newspaper VG cited criminal sources claiming incineration. The art world entered a state of low-grade collective grief.

Six suspects went on trial in early 2006. Three were convicted in May: Bjørn Hoen (7 years, for planning the heist), Petter Tharaldsen (8 years, for driving the getaway car), and Petter Rosenvinge (4 years, for supplying the vehicle). Hoen and Tharaldsen were additionally ordered to pay 750 million kroner — roughly $117 million — to the City of Oslo. A symbolic sentence. The paintings were still missing.

In April 2005, Toska — Norway's most wanted man — was arrested in a hotel room in Malaga, Spain. He allegedly confessed to orchestrating the NOKAS robbery and provided police with information confirming their suspicions about the Munch theft. The connection between the two crimes was real: the art heist had been commissioned as a diversion — a piece of logistical theatre designed to pull Norwegian law enforcement's most experienced detectives away from the NOKAS investigation while Toska arranged his escape.

The paintings, however, were still in the wind.

Then, in August 2006, Oslo police received a tip. The source — as reported by Norwegian newspapers — was a lawyer acting for Toska. Later, Scotland Yard detective Charles Hill — the same man who ran the 1994 sting — revealed a different account: a criminal already serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery had traded information about the paintings' location in exchange for improved prison conditions, and possibly the M&M reward. Oslo police have never officially confirmed how the tip came in, who provided it, or what was exchanged.

On August 31, 2006, Norwegian police announced that they had recovered both The Scream and Madonna. Police chief Stensrud told a press conference that "the damage was much less than feared." They have never revealed where the paintings were found, who was holding them at the point of recovery, or what precisely happened in the final handover. That information remains classified.

What they did confirm: both paintings had suffered. The Scream showed moisture damage to its lower left corner — evidence of poor storage, of a painting shoved somewhere cold and damp for two years. Madonna had tears and holes in the canvas. The men who took them had treated them not as masterpieces but as liabilities. Restorers went to work immediately.

In May 2008, the Munch Museum reopened both works to the public in a special exhibition called Scream and Madonna — Revisited. The museum, by now, looked nothing like the institution from which they had been pulled. Visitors now walk through airport-style metal detectors. The most valuable canvases sit behind bulletproof glass. The security head has publicly confirmed that NOK 40 million was spent on protection measures — while declining to detail the most sensitive systems.

The dual theft of The Scream is often framed as a story about audacity — about brazen criminals who stole the world's most recognisable anguish and got away with it for years. That framing, while accurate, is incomplete.

What the crimes really expose is a hierarchy of failure. Museums hang irreplaceable objects on wires and assume reputation is security. Thieves understand, correctly, that stealing famous art is almost trivially easy — the hard part is monetising it afterwards. Julian Radcliffe, who has run the Art Loss Register since 1991, put it plainly: nowhere else do you find millions of dollars hanging on a wall, accessible to anyone who walks through the door. The theft is low-risk. The profit-making is the problem.

For this reason, stolen masterpieces rarely end up on a buyer's wall. They become collateral — bargaining chips in criminal negotiations, leveraged against police investigations or legal proceedings. The 2004 Munch theft was perhaps the most explicit iteration of this model: the paintings were not stolen for their aesthetic value. They were stolen as a diversion, a logistical piece in a much larger criminal operation involving armed robbery and the death of a police officer.

There is something almost Munchian about that. The figure in The Scream doesn't confront the viewer. It recoils from something the viewer cannot see — a terror that exists just outside the frame. In 2004, The Scream itself became that figure: the visible symbol of an invisible criminal architecture playing out in the streets of Stavanger and the hotel rooms of Malaga.

The 1910 Scream now hangs in the new MUNCH Museum — a striking contemporary building that opened in 2021, looming over the Oslo waterfront. It sits behind glass. Sensors and cameras watch it. The wire it once hung on is long gone.

But ask whether another attempt might come, and the answer is telling. "There are some thieves," says Julian Radcliffe of the Art Loss Register, "who are drawn to the spectacular — whether that's out of ego, bravado, or a sense of professional pride."

The figure on the bridge keeps screaming. Someone, somewhere, is still listening.

Sources: Wikipedia · Smithsonian · Euronews · NPR · Crime Museum · Irish Times · N by Norwegian · Security Info Watch · Britannica · Art News · HISTORY · FutureLearn · MutualArt