Police in Brussels say thieves have escaped with a cache of diamonds worth at least $50 million, in a daring airport heist.
Reports say a group of armed, masked men broke through a security fence at the Brussels airport, late Monday, drove their vehicles onto the tarmac and took the diamonds from a security van waiting to load the cargo onto a plane bound for Switzerland. Authorities say the robbers completed their theft within minutes, with no shots fired.
Police later found a burned-out vehicle near the airport.
A spokeswoman at the Antwerp World Diamond Center confirmed the worth of the missing stones, telling the French news agency that this is one of the biggest diamond thefts of all time.