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By ARON HELLER
The Associated Press

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JERUSALEM - It took time, but Israeli police detectives have cracked one of the country's greatest crimes - the legendary heist of a priceless clock collection from a Jerusalem museum a quarter century ago.

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LOST AND FOUND: This photo provided by the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art shows a pistol-shaped clock made by the Rochat Brothers in the early 19th century. It’s one of the items returned after Israeli police detectives cracked a legendary clock heist at a Jerusalem museum after a 25-year search.

The 1983 theft, the costliest in Israel's history, saw 106 timepieces worth millions of dollars disappear from the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art.

Among them was a pocket watch made for French queen Marie Antoinette that museum officials value at more than US$30 million.

Although the stolen clocks had no connection to Islamic culture, they were displayed in the museum because they had originally belonged to the father of the museum's founder.

The heist baffled police for more than two decades.

But detectives now blame Naaman Diller - a notorious Israeli thief who fled to Europe and died in the United States in 2004.

Investigators got their first break two years ago, when the museum informed them it paid some $40,000 to an anonymous American woman to buy back 40 of the items, including the Marie Antoinette timepiece made by famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet.

Rachel Hasson, the museum's artistic director, calls the gold and rock crystal watch "the Mona Lisa of the clock world." Also recovered were a Breguet creation from 1819 known as the Sympathiques and a clock shaped like a pistol from the same period.

Police forensics experts were allowed to examine the clocks, and detectives questioned the lawyer who negotiated the sale. The trail led to an Israeli woman in Los Angeles named Nili Shamrat, who police identified as the widow of Diller - a notorious criminal in Israel after a string of bold thefts in the 1960s and '70s.

From there the mystery began to unravel, police say. Diller apparently confessed the crime to his wife on his deathbed.

When Israeli police and American law enforcement officials arrived at her home last May to question her, they found more of the stolen clocks.

Police placed a gag order on the case, but lifted it last week after Israeli media violated the order.