Antonello da Messina heist 'may have been inside job'

The theft of four works by Renaissance master Antonello da Messina during an annual religious festival on the Feast of the Assumption in his native Sicilian city on Saturday may have been an inside job, Italian police said on Monday. The four parts of an altarpiece were some of the only works by Antonello held in Messina. While hundreds of devotees and onlookers in Piazza Duomo were paying homage to the Vara procession, with security measures in place to ensure everything ran smoothly, and the Ferragosto sun had set a couple of hours earlier, the sensational robbery took place at the regional museum, 4 km away from the site of the celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It brought to mind the incredible and daring theft carried out almost a year ago at the Louvre in Paris, when a