£430m artworks stolen in Paris raid

The masked man was caught on surveillance video getting into a back window and past the state-of-the art alarm system at the Paris Museum of Modern Art.

He took the works, which included a Picasso and Matisse, by calmly dismantling the frames and left with the canvases.

Christophe Girard, the city's deputy culture secretary, said police were trying to discover whether the intruder was operating alone. He said three guards were on duty overnight but "saw nothing".

The prosecutor's office initially estimated the five paintings' were worth at as much as 430m but Mr Girard insisted the figure was "just under 100 million euros (85m)".

He said Le pigeon aux petits-pois (The Pigeon with the Peas) an ochre and brown Cubist oil painting by Pablo Picasso, was worth an estimated 20m, and La Pastorale (Pastoral), an oil painting of nudes on a hillside by Henri Matisse about 13m.

However, museums and art dealers tend to value artworks very differently and recent Picasso cubist works of the same period have

sold at auction for as much as 70m.

The other paintings stolen were L'olivier pres de l'Estaque (Olive Tree near Estaque) by Georges Braque; La femme a l'eventail (Woman with a Fan) by Amedeo Modigliani; and Nature-mort aux Chandeliers (Still Life with Chandeliers) by Fernand Leger.