Two men have been arrested in relation to the brazen robbery of the French crown jewels at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. The pair are being questioned for “gang theft”.
In a statement, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau confirmed the arrests, but declined to give any details until after the suspects’ interrogation, which can go on for up to four days. France’s interior minister Laurent Nuñez posted a message on X congratulating the police and calling for details of the “ongoing investigation”, involving 100 officers, to remain a secret.
According to Paris Match, a weekly magazine, a French-Algerian citizen was apprehended on Saturday night at Paris’ Roissy airport while boarding a flight to Algeria, and the second suspect soon after at an address in the Paris suburbs, while he was preparing to flee to Mali.
Both men are in their thirties and came from Seine-Saint-Denis to the north of the capital, according to the daily Le Parisien. There is no news of the eight stolen royal and imperial jewels, valued by the Louvre at €88m and mounted with more than 8,000 diamonds, sapphires and emeralds.
According to police sources, both suspects had criminal records and were identified with the help of DNA analysis, along with CCTV footage and phone tracking, within days of the theft. Authorities then followed the suspects in a bid to find their accomplices and the jewels, intervening upon their attempt to flee the country.
The heist, while breathtakingly fast, was nonetheless flawed. The thieves left behind their tools, gloves, a helmet and a yellow vest, as well as the elevator truck they had used, which they failed to set on fire thanks to the intervention of Louvre staff.
As they fled the building, they also dropped the most valuable item, the crown of Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III. It was spotted by a Louvre employee under the balcony of the Apollo Gallery. Curators say the crown, flattened and damaged when it was pulled through a crack of the protective glass, can be restored.
A total of 150 samples were collected from the crime scene, according to Beccau.
An ongoing backlash
Political turmoil around the theft has been intensifying all week. The Louvre’s director Laurence des Cars, when summoned by the French senate, struggled to explain the “considerable delays in the maintenance” of the museum’s technical infrastructure that were detailed in a preliminary report by the Cour des comptes, France’s state auditing body. She said she had offered her resignation to the culture minister Rachida Dati, who refused it.
Some senators demanded Dati’s resignation. Des Cars acknowledged a “terrible failure”, but shifted the blame to her predecessors, claiming the museum was in a derelict state when she took over in 2021. She also deplored the lack of cameras outside the museum, which are the responsibility of the Paris police department. There is only one camera, she said, covering the entire riverbank side of the museum and it does not surveil the balcony of the Apollo Gallery. This enabled the thieves to park an elevator truck on the pavement and climb the ladder without being noticed.
“No one ever thought of taking care of the safety of the works in museums,” Dati said on M6 TV. This statement, however, contradicts extracts from the Cour des comptes’s report, due to be published in November, and which have been seen by The Art Newspaper. The report says Laurence des Cars’ predecessors launched a comprehensive series of safety plans well before her appointment, which were left “largely unimplemented”.
The report points out that about two thirds of the galleries still are without cameras. During the senate’s hearings, the Louvre’s deputy general administrator, Francis Steinbock, claimed the delays arose from “very complex studies” that needed to be undertaken ahead of ambitious plans to build a new entrance for the museum, as well as an expansive subterranean complex around the Mona Lisa and an exhibition hall.
Laurence des Cars promised that €80m of the renovation’s costs will be dedicated to security and safety infrastructure, but the chairman of the senate committee, Laurent Lafon, pointed out at the hearing that funding for the work, which could last for 15 years and cost €1bn, has yet to be found.
The Louvre reopened its doors Wednesday, but the gilded Apollo Gallery of decorative art remains closed. According to RTL radio, all of the Louvre’s jewellery was moved to a safe in the Banque de France on Friday, next to the national gold reserves. Among the objects were the museum’s most famous diamonds: the Regent (140.64 carats) and the Sancy (55.23 carats).
Following this and several other recent incidents, the government has announced a complete survey of museum security across France. Official sources say several suspects have been arrested in connection with other burglaries: a 34-year old Chinese woman, for example, was apprehended in Barcelona with 1kg of gold, which had allegedly been melted down from raw nuggets stolen from the Natural History Museum.
Meanwhile, suspects have recently been arrested in connection with the theft of snuff boxes from an exhibition at Parisian Museum Cognacq-Jay. Five of these precious boxes, which had been lent by the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum‘s Gilbert Collection and the British Royal Collection have already been recovered following a plea deal.
The French Gemology Laboratory has proposed that all jewels and stones owned by museums are registered in a data bank so that they can be identified even if they have been cut.
