OSLO, NORWAY.-Norwegian police announced they are looking for eight new suspects that may have been involved in the theft of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.

Iver Stensrud, police inspector in charge of the investigation said, “We foresee new arrests.”

So far, Norwegian police have arrested five people, three of which remain in custody. The two people that were released are thought to have played a minor role in the theft. The Scream and Madonna paintings are still missing. They were stolen around a year ago from the Munch Museum in Oslo.

Munch Museum spokesman Jorunn Christoffersen said, "We're still hopeful, but we are no longer confident. The chances of finding the paintings diminish with time and already a lot of a time has passed."

The Scream and Madonna in the Munch Museum collection were in the artist's possession when he died in 1944, and part of his great bequest to the City of Oslo.

The Scream in the Munch Museum is one of two painted versions of the image. The other is to be found in the National Gallery, Oslo. The National Gallery version is signed and dated 1893, and many scholars believe this to be the first one. Both versions are painted on cardboard, and Munch has also sketched the image on the reverse side of the National Gallery version. The Scream - one of the two versions - was first exhibited at Unter den Linden in Berlin in December 1893. In 1895 an important version of the image was produced as a lithograph. There exist two pastels of the image, one belonging to the Munch Museum, the other privately owned. There are also a few sketches related to The Scream on a sheet of paper in the Munch Museum collection.