Louvre jewel heist investigation nets 4 extra arrests, authorities say

4 extra individuals had been arrested Tuesday within the investigation into final month’s spectacular daylight heist of imperial jewels from the Louvre Museum, French authorities introduced.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, whose workplace is heading the investigation, described the suspects as two males aged 38 and 39 and two ladies aged 31 and 40 from the Paris area.

Her assertion did not say what position they’re suspected of getting performed within the Oct. 19 theft. Police can maintain them for questioning for 96 hours.

The loot, valued at round $102 million, hasn’t been recovered. It features a diamond-and-emerald necklace Napoleon gave to Empress Marie-Louise, jewels tied to Nineteenth-century Queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense, and Empress Eugénie’s pearl-and-diamond tiara.

The thieves dropped a diamond-and-emerald-studded crown that after belonged to Eugénie, the spouse of Napoleon III, as they escaped.

A police dragnet has beforehand caught different suspected members of the four-person staff thought to have carried out the daring theft. Investigating magistrates have filed preliminary prices towards three males and one lady who had been arrested final month.

The heist unfolded when the Louvre, the world’s most-visited artwork museum, was raided in broad daylight. The gang took simply seven minutes to steal the jewels earlier than fleeing on scooters.

The thieves parked a transferring truck with a ladder under the museum’s Apollo Gallery housing the jewels, ascended in a bucket, broke a window and used angle grinders to chop into glass show cubicles containing the treasures.

One of many males already charged within the heist, a 37-year-old, was in a relationship with the lady and so they have kids, Beccuau stated earlier this month. The couple had been arrested after their DNA was discovered within the basket raise used throughout the theft. The person’s felony file contained 11 earlier convictions, most of them for theft, she stated.

The primary two males arrested earlier had been additionally recognized to the police for having dedicated thefts. Each lived within the northeastern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers.

Final week, Louvre director Laurence des Vehicles revealed some new particulars concerning the safety breach, saying the facility instruments utilized by robbers to chop by way of the show instances had been meant for concrete.

“It is a technique that had not been imagined in any respect” when the show instances within the Apollo Gallery had been changed in 2019, she stated Wednesday whereas telling lawmakers that new surveillance cameras and anti-intrusion techniques will quickly be put in on the Paris landmark. On the time, they’d been designed primarily to counter an assault from contained in the museum with weapons, she added.

Footage from museum cameras present that throughout the theft, the show instances “held up remarkably nicely and didn’t break aside,” she stated. “Movies present how tough it was for the thieves.”

Des Vehicles harassed safety enchancment is a precedence of the decade-long “Louvre New Renaissance” plan launched earlier this 12 months, with an estimated price of as much as 800 million euros ($933 million), to modernize infrastructure, ease crowding and provides the Mona Lisa a devoted gallery by 2031.

With the Louvre crumbling below the load of mass tourism, des Vehicles has restricted the each day variety of guests to 30,000 lately.

The famed glass pyramid inaugurated in 1989 was meant to welcome about 4 million guests a 12 months, she recalled. This 12 months, already greater than 8 million individuals have visited the Louvre.