Police tracked two men for days after finding DNA at the Louvre. They arrested them on Saturday, six days after the October 19 theft of French royal and Napoleonic-era jewelry worth an estimated $102 million.
One of the suspects was about to leave the country. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said officers detained a man at Charles de Gaulle airport, and that one or more other people had also been arrested. Axel Ronde, spokesman for the CFTC police union, told NBC the man planned to flee to Algeria, which is why police moved when they did.
Both men are in their 30s and from Aubervilliers, a suburb northeast of Paris, Ronde said. They had prior convictions and “were known to police having previously targeted jewelry stores.”
What the thieves left behind
The thieves were careless on the way out. According to Ronde, they “left gloves, a walkie-talkie, a vest, and a can of gasoline,” and forensic officers recovered the DNA from those items. They also appear to have dropped a diamond- and emerald-encrusted crown as they fled.
The robbery itself happened in daylight. Four thieves in yellow vests, dressed to look like construction workers, used a truck with an extendable ladder to reach a second-floor balcony and broke a window to get in. They took eight pieces from the Apollo gallery, home of the French crown jewels. Among them were a tiara with some 1,000 diamonds, an emerald necklace, a pair of emerald earrings, a diadem, a sapphire necklace and a sapphire earring. Then they left through the window and rode off on scooters.
A complaint about leaks
French media reported the arrests before Beccuau’s announcement, citing anonymous sources. She was not pleased. “I deeply deplore the hasty disclosure of this information,” she said. “This revelation can only harm the investigative efforts of the hundred or so investigators deployed in the search for both the stolen jewelry and all the criminals.”
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has put the number of investigators on the case at more than 60.
Sources
Sources
- Google News – News about Louvre • heist – Overview
- Reports: At Least Two Arrested in Louvre Heist – JCK
