PARIS — Suspects have been arrested in connection with the theft of crown jewels from Paris’s Louvre museum, the Paris prosecutor said on Sunday, a week after the heist at the world’s most visited museum that stunned the word.
The prosecutor said that investigators made the arrests on Saturday evening, adding that one of the men taken into custody was preparing to leave the country from Roissy Airport.
French media BFM TV and Le Parisien newspaper earlier reported that two suspects had been arrested and taken into custody. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau did not confirm the number of arrests and did not say whether jewels had been recovered.
Thieves took less than eight minutes to steal jewels valued at 88 million euros ($102 million) last Sunday morning. French officials described how the intruders used a basket lift to scale the Louvre’s façade, forced open a window, smashed display cases and fled. The museum’s director called the incident a “terrible failure.”
Beccuau said investigators from a special police unit in charge of armed robberies, serious burglaries and art thefts made the arrests. She rued in her statement the premature leak of information, saying it could hinder the work of over 100 investigators “mobilized to recover the stolen jewels and apprehend all of the perpetrators.”
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Beccuau said further details will be unveiled after the suspects’ custody period ends.
French Interior minister Laurent Nunez praised “the investigators who have worked tirelessly, just as I asked them to, and who have always had my full confidence.”
The window of the Louvre Museum is seen with the glasses covered after the thieves broke them to get in and steal priceless jewels. (Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP)
The Louvre reopened earlier this week after one of the highest-profile museum thefts of the century stunned the world with its audacity and scale.
The thieves slipped in and out, making off with parts of France’s Crown Jewels — a cultural wound that some compared to the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019.
The thieves made away with a total of eight objects, including a sapphire diadem, necklace and single earring from a set linked to 19th-century queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense.
They also took an emerald necklace and earrings tied to Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife, as well as a reliquary brooch. Empress Eugénie’s diamond diadem and her large corsage-bow brooch — an imperial ensemble of rare craftsmanship — were also part of the loot.
One piece — Eugénie’s emerald-set imperial crown with more than 1,300 diamonds — was later found outside the museum, damaged but recoverable.
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