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2025-11-26 Europe
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Four more arrested in Louvre jewelry heist, but priceless loot still unfound
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They’d brought in CGI Group, a project of retired Israeli counterintelligence officers, and had found their first miscreant at the airport, headed for Algeria. The first two captures lived in Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburb north of Paris, so we have the slightest hint of Moslem colonists, but the French authorities appear unwilling to say anything explicitly.  [IsraelTimes] Two men and two women join four already detained, including a couple with children; thieves stole $102 million worth of French imperial jewels.
French authorities Tuesday arrested four more people in the probe into last month’s spectacular daylight theft of imperial jewels from the Louvre museum, the top Paris prosecutor said.
“They are two men aged 38 and 39, and two women aged 31 and 40, all from the Paris region,” Laure Beccuau said, following earlier charges against four others over the October 19 heist.
Last month, a four-strong gang raided the Louvre, the world’s most-visited art museum, in broad daylight, taking just seven minutes to steal jewelry worth an estimated $102 million before fleeing on scooters.
The thieves parked a moving truck with a ladder below the museum’s Apollo Gallery housing the French crown jewels, ascended in a bucket, broke a window and used angle grinders to cut into glass display booths containing the treasures.
The four already charged over the theft include three men and a woman.
The thieves dropped a diamond- and emerald-studded crown that once belonged to Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III, as they escaped.
But they made off with eight other items of jewelry including an emerald-and-diamond necklace that Napoleon I gave his second wife, Empress Marie-Louise.
One of the men already charged in the heist, a 37-year-old, was in a relationship with the woman and they have children, Beccuau said earlier this month. The couple were arrested after their DNA was found in the basket lift used during the robbery. The man's criminal record contained 11 previous convictions, most of them for theft, she said.
The first two men arrested earlier were also known to the police for having committed thefts. Both lived in the northeastern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers.
Last week, Louvre director Laurence des Cars revealed some new details about the security breach, saying the power tools used by robbers to cut through the display cases were meant for concrete.
"It's a method that had not been imagined at all" when the display cases in the Apollo Gallery were replaced in 2019, she said Wednesday while telling lawmakers that new surveillance cameras and anti-intrusion systems will soon be installed at the Paris landmark. At the time, they had been designed primarily to counter an attack from inside the museum with weapons, she added.
Footage from museum cameras show that during the robbery, the display cases "held up remarkably well and did not break apart," she said. "Videos show how difficult it was for the thieves."
Des Cars stressed security improvement is a priority of the decade-long "Louvre New Renaissance" plan launched earlier this year, with an estimated cost of up to 800 million euros ($933 million), to modernize infrastructure, ease crowding and give the Mona Lisa a dedicated gallery by 2031.
With the Louvre crumbling under the weight of mass tourism, des Cars has restricted the daily number of visitors to 30,000 in recent years.
< Earlier it was reported that the court of Paris considered the cases of several people detained on October 29 as part of the investigation of the Louvre robbery. According to the results of the consideration of two of the five detainees, three were released.
The Louvre robbery occurred on October 19, the attackers took less than eight minutes for this. They penetrated the Apollo gallery through a window through a building tower and opened the protective showcases with special electrical equipment.
On the evening of October 25, police detained two suspects in the Louvre robbery, one of them tried to fly to Algeria. On the morning of October 30, a third suspect was arrested. And a few hours later, the RTL radio station, citing sources in the Paris prosecutor’s office, reported the detention of five more people.
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Posted by trailing wife 2025-11-26 00:00||
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