A hunt is still under way for the gang of four who, over the space of less than 10 minutes last Sunday morning, broke into one of the world’s most famous museums. They made off with eight prized pieces of jewellery including a diamond and emerald necklace Emperor Napoleon gave to his wife.<\/p>\n
As they fled, they dropped a 19th-Century diamond-studded crown belonging to Empress Eugenie. Although it was recovered, the crown was damaged, and Laurence des Cars told the senators that it had probably been crushed as the thieves prised it from its display case. <\/p>\n
“Initial assessments suggest that a delicate restoration is possible,” she said.<\/p>\n
The thieves used a truck fitted with a mechanical ladder to reach the first floor gallery at 09:30 (07:30 GMT), half an hour after the Louvre opened its doors for the day.<\/p>\n
Des Cars praised the security guards who she said acted quickly to evacuate the building as soon as they were aware there had been an intrusion into the Gallery of Apollo. <\/p>\n
But she conceded: “We did not spot the arrival of the thieves early enough… the weakness of our perimeter protection is known.”<\/p>\n
The museum re-opened on Wednesday, although the gallery remained shut.<\/p>\n
The Louvre is home to priceless works of art including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. <\/p>\n
Laurence des Cars, who became director of the Louvre in 2021, said she wanted to double the number of CCTV cameras at the museum.<\/p>\n
She said she was warned about how “obsolete” the equipment at the Louvre was when she took the job, in contrast to the modern equipment of the Mus\u00e9e d’Orsay, where she had worked previously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A hunt is still under way for the gang of four who, over the space of less than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-218507","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}