![\"French](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/0023572f-614.jpg\"\/)
\nThe whole raid took just seven minutes and was thought to have been carried out by an experienced team<\/p>\n
France’s Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin has admitted to security flaws in protecting the Louvre that had led to robbers stealing imperial jewels in broad daylight from the Paris museum.<\/p>\n
“What is certain is that we have failed, since people were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of Paris, get people up it in several minutes to grab priceless jewels and give France a terrible image,” Gerald Darmanin told France Inter radio.<\/p>\n
The museum remains closed today.<\/p>\n
Officials said a team of 60 investigators are working on the theory that yesterday’s raid was planned and executed by an organised crime group.<\/p>\n
In France, it reignited a row over the lack of security in France’s museums, which the new Interior Minister Laurent Nunez acknowledged yesterday was a “major weak spot”.<\/p>\n
The thieves arrived between 9.30 and 9.40am yesterday, shortly after the museum opened to the public at 9am, a source close to the investigation said.<\/p>\n
They used a furniture hoist to get access to the Apollo Gallery, home to the royal collection, and cutting equipment to get in through a window and open the display cases.<\/p>\n
A brief clip of the raid, apparently filmed on the phone of a visitor to the museum, was broadcast on French news channels.<\/p>\n
The masked robbers stole nine 19th-century items of jewellery, one of which – the crown of the Empress Eugenie – was dropped and damaged as they made their escape.<\/p>\n
Seven-minute raid<\/p>\n
\nThe whole raid took just seven minutes and was thought to have been carried out by an experienced team<\/p>\n
Eight “priceless” items of jewellery were stolen, the culture ministry said. The list it released included an emerald-and-diamond necklace that Napoleon gave his wife, Empress Marie Louise.<\/p>\n
Also stolen was a diadem that once belonged to the Empress Eugenie, which has nearly 2,000 diamonds; and a necklace that once belonged to Marie-Amelie, the last queen of France. It has eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, according to the Louvre’s website.<\/p>\n
The whole raid took just seven minutes and was thought to have been carried out by an experienced team, possibly “foreigners”, said Mr Nunez.<\/p>\n
The intervention of the museum’s staff forced the robbers to flee, leaving behind some of the equipment used in the raid, said the culture ministry in a statement.<\/p>\n
The stolen items would be impossible to sell on in their current state, said the president of the leading auctioneer Drouot Patrimoine, Alexandre Giquello.<\/p>\n
National ‘humiliation’<\/p>\n
It was the first theft from the Louvre since 1998, when a painting by Corot was stolen and never seen again.<\/p>\n
The raid relaunched a debate over what critics says is the poor security at the nation’s museums, far less secure than banks and increasingly targeted by thieves.<\/p>\n
Last month, criminals broke into Paris’s Natural History Museum, making off with gold samples.<\/p>\n
The same month, thieves stole two dishes and a vase from a museum in the central city of Limoges, the losses estimated at \u20ac6.5 million.<\/p>\n
Yesterday’s robbery sparked angry political reactions.<\/p>\n
“How far will the disintegration of the state go?” said far-right National Rally party leader Jordan Bardella on social media, calling the theft “an unbearable humiliation for our country”.<\/p>\n
President Emmanuel Macron said on social media that “everything is being done” to catch the perpetrators and recover the stolen treasures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"France’s Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin has admitted to security flaws in protecting the Louvre that had led to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-92171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}