Experts say jewels stolen in heists from the iconic Parisian museum are harder to recover than stolen paintings, as they can be quickly broken down.
The band of robbers who broke into the Louvre Museum in Paris on Sunday morning and stole eight Napoleonic pieces of priceless jewellery in a four-minute heist were just the latest in a long line of daring thieves who have targeted the iconic museum.
The robbers used a truck-mounted ladder to reach the gilded Galerie d’Apollon (Apollo’s Gallery) on the second floor before taking an angle grinder to a window to access the French crown jewels. The heist took place at 9:30am (07:30 GMT), half an hour after the museum opened to visitors for the day. The robbers are still at large and the Louvre is currently closed.
A ninth item they stole – the crown belonging to Empress Eugenie, Napoleon III’s wife – was recovered nearby after it was dropped by the group, the French Ministry of the Interior said.
The Louvre was a royal palace for more than two centuries. It opened as a public museum in 1793 during the French Revolution. The revolution had made totems of monarchical history especially vulnerable to looters, and the Louvre, b
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