The 2011 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts theft took place in two separate incidents during September and October of that year.

In both instances, the same thief took a small ancient stone piece that was openly exhibited, without a protective case, and smuggled it out of the museum.

On September 3, one day before the anniversary of the 1972 robbery of 18 paintings, a visitor took a sandstone Achaemenid Empire relief.

In 2013, police were led to Simon Metke, an Edmonton man who had bought the Achaemenid piece for CDN$1,400 during a visit to Montreal two years earlier, believing it to possibly be a replica, after it was seen on a wall behind him during a CBC interview unrelated to the case.

[3] Charges laid against Metke were disposed with a conditional discharge after he pled guilty to possession of stolen property.

[4] The relief itself was later found to have been taken from Iran illegally, and returned there after being seized from a dealer's wares during a New York art fair.

On September 3, 2011, a visitor who came to the museum shortly after it opened removed a 20-by-21-by-3-centimetre (7.9 by 8.3 by 1.2 in)[5] sandstone relief depicting a soldier's head, produced during the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled Persia during the 5th century BCE;[6] it had been donated to the museum in the 1950s by Frederick Cleveland Morgan, heir to a department store fortune, art collector and philanthropist.

[5] When it discovered the pieces, both of which were part of the museum's permanent collection, missing, the museum called the Sureté du Québec's (SQ) art theft unit, the only one in any Canadian provincial police force, and AXA, its insurance company, which also dispatched a team of art-theft specialists.

When it did inform the news media, it released a description of the suspect and offered rewards for both the thief's identity and the safe return of the missing items.

[8] John Fossey, an archaeologist, told CTV later that he believed the two pieces had not been stolen to order but simply because they were "small [and] easy to put in the bag.

"[8] Another expert involved, art-theft investigator Mark Dalrymple, observed that the case was similar to a series of 2004 thefts from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, which also involved small objects taken by visitors while the museum was open to the public, objects whose return he had secured.

After he had satisfied himself from the results that he was not buying something looted or stolen, he bought the item, believing that, with 2012, the last year in the Mayan Calendar, a month away, it was his destiny to acquire the artwork.

For the time being, he packed the piece in his luggage and flew with it back to Edmonton, where the airline briefly lost the suitcase containing the relief upon his arrival.

[4] Later he moved it to a shelf in his bedroom, where he put it amid a collection of Star Wars action figures, crystals and stuffed animals.

[4] A month after returning to Edmonton, he gave an interview to a CBC News crew for a story unrelated to the artwork he had just purchased.

"The sun's coming in through the window, the bougainvillea flowers are glowing, the crystals are making rainbows," recalled Metke.

[4] A team of Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) from both Alberta and Quebec, along with the SQ/AXA investigators, quickly located the relief.