25.11.2025
French authorities have arrested four more people in the probe into last month’s spectacular daylight theft of imperial jewels from the Louvre museum.
Top Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said the two men aged 38 and 39, and two women aged 31 and 40 are all from the Paris region. The arrests follow earlier charges against four others over the heist.
On October 19, a four-person gang raided the Louvre, the world’s most-visited art museum, in daylight, taking just seven minutes to steal jewellery worth an estimated US$102 million before fleeing on scooters.
The thieves parked a moving truck with a ladder below the museum’s Apollo Gallery housing the French crown jewels, ascended in a bucket, broke a window and used angle grinders to cut into glass display booths containing the treasures.
The first two men arrested earlier were also known to the police for having committed thefts. Both lived in the northeastern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers.
The thieves dropped a diamond- and emerald-studded crown that once belonged to Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III, as they escaped.
But they made off with eight other items of jewellery, including an emerald-and-diamond necklace that Napoleon I gave his second wife, Empress Marie-Louise.
The loot has still not been found.
The audacious heist made headlines worldwide and spotlighted museum security in France, which has had a series of break-ins at cultural institutions. AFP