Louvre jewelry theft investigation yields four more arrests, authorities say

Four more people were arrested Tuesday in the investigation into last month’s spectacular daylight robbery of imperial jewels of the Louvre Museum, announced the French authorities.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, whose office is leading the investigation, described the suspects as two men aged 38 and 39 and two women aged 31 and 40 from the Paris region.

Their statement did not say what role they are suspected of playing in the Oct. 19 robbery. Police can hold them for questioning for 96 hours.

The loot, valued at around $102 million, has not been recovered. It includes a diamond and emerald necklace that Napoleon gave to Empress Marie Louise, jewelry linked to 19th-century queens Marie Amélie and Hortensia, and Empress Eugenie’s pearl and diamond tiara.

While escaping, the robbers dropped a crown studded with diamonds and emeralds that belonged to Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III.

A police network has previously captured other alleged members of the four-person team believed to have carried out the daring robbery. Investigating judges have filed preliminary charges against three men and a woman who were arrested last month.

The heist unfolded when the Louvre, the most visited art museum in the world, was broken into in broad daylight. It took the gang just seven minutes to steal the jewelery before fleeing on scooters.

The thieves parked a moving truck with a ladder under the museum’s Apollo Gallery that houses the jewels, climbed into a bucket, smashed a window and used angle grinders to cut through glass display cabinets containing the treasures.

One of the men already charged with the robbery, a 37-year-old man, was in a relationship with the woman and they have children, Beccuau said earlier this month. The pair were arrested after their DNA was found on the lifting basket used during the robbery. The man’s criminal record contained 11 previous convictions, most of them for robbery, he said.

The first two men arrested earlier were also known to the police for having committed robberies. They both lived in the suburb of Aubervilliers, northeast of Paris.

Last week, Louvre director Laurence des Cars revealed some new details about the security breach, saying that the power tools used by the thieves to cut into the display cases were intended for concrete.

“It’s a method that had not been imagined at all” when the Apollo Gallery’s display cases were replaced in 2019, he said Wednesday while announcing to lawmakers that new surveillance cameras and anti-intrusion systems will soon be installed at the Parisian monument. At the time, they were designed primarily to counter a weapons attack from inside the museum, he added.

Footage from the museum’s cameras shows that during the theft, the display cases “held up remarkably well and were not broken,” he said. “The videos show how difficult it was for the thieves.”

Des Cars highlighted that improving security is a priority of the decade-long plan “New Renaissance of the Louvre” released earlier this yearwith an estimated cost of up to 800 million euros ($933 million), to modernize infrastructure, relieve overcrowding 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.

The famous glass pyramid inaugurated in 1989 was supposed to receive about 4 million visitors a year, he recalled. This year more than 8 million people have already visited the Louvre.