{"id":91027,"date":"2025-10-20T23:40:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T23:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/91027\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T23:40:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T23:40:10","slug":"race-against-time-to-find-stolen-louvre-jewels-art-detective-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/91027\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Race against time’ to find stolen Louvre jewels, art detective says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Authorities will likely only have a couple of weeks to recover the jewellery stolen in a brazen daylight heist of the famed Louvre museum in Paris, an art detective says.<\/p>\n

Thieves used a basket lift to gain access to the Apollon gallery, smashing display cases, taking eight priceless Napoleonic pieces<\/a> and fleeing on scooters.<\/p>\n

The entire heist took just seven minutes.<\/p>\n

Art detective Arthur Brand told Breakfast the suspects are likely to lay low for a couple of weeks, while police and media attention<\/a> is at a frenzy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s a race against time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they catch them within one or two weeks, they might have a chance to get these items back. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf it takes longer, in many of these cases you catch the thieves, but you’ll never find the loot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brand has earned the moniker of \u201cthe Indiana Jones of the art world\u201d, after recovering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stolen art over his career, and described the Louvre incident as the \u201cheist of the decade\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Marie-Louise necklace and earrings were among the stolen items. (Source: Louvre Museum)<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you steal art, you cannot cut it down. You have to keep it in one piece. With these pieces like gold, silver, diamonds, you can dismantle them. You can melt down the gold, you can melt down the silver.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of these crowns had hundreds of diamonds, so if you dismantle them and you sell them separately, it’s very hard to link them to this heist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more: Here’s a look at other famous museum heists as thieves hit the Louvre<\/a><\/p>\n

Brand believes the thieves were planning this for years, but only recently saw the opportunity to strike.<\/p>\n

\u201cRecently, they started construction work there and that was their chance. They [were] disguised as construction workers with yellow jackets, they had a mechanical ladder with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo they fit in and probably most people thought that they are just working here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Police<\/p>\n

Police officers look for clues by a basket lift used by thieves Sunday, Oct. 19, 2025 at the Louvre museum in Paris (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n

The robbery came just four months after Louvre staff walked off the job, complaining that overcrowding and understaffing had spread security resources too thin.<\/p>\n

Brand says museums have less protection than jewellery shops, making them an easier target.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuseums don’t have the money\u2026 so it’s easier to go to a museum than to rob something else.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut having said that, to target the Louvre, you know, nobody would have thought that it would be possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The morning’s headlines in 90 seconds, including a massive outage breaks the internet, weather warnings and watched in force, more allegations levelled against Prince Andrew. (Source: 1News)<\/p>\n

However, he says all hope for catching the robbers and recovering the jewels is not lost.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey left some DNA, most likely. They left some pieces there. These are professional criminals, so that DNA must be somewhere in the system,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe other lead is that there’s so much media attention, so the possibility that somebody wants to take this in to melt it down or to touch these diamonds, I think it’s very low.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that these thieves underestimated the panic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Louvre remains closed as police investigate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Authorities will likely only have a couple of weeks to recover the jewellery stolen in a brazen daylight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,2567,499,500,67,501,156,111,139,69,1745],"class_list":["post-91027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-arts-and-culture","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-crime-and-justice","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-uk-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}