Heist at Louvre Leaves Museum Missing Priceless Jewels
Thieves use portable elevator, angle grinder to access and saw through window to steal royal artifacts, officials say
PARIS—Tourists were streaming into the world’s most visited museum on Sunday when a group of thieves burst in through a window of a gilded gallery on the second floor—and made off with a set of priceless royal jewels.
It was broad daylight, roughly 9:30 a.m. local time, when three or four individuals used a portable elevator mounted on a truck to reach a balcony facing the Seine River. There, the thieves used what appeared to be an angle grinder to cut their way inside the Galerie d’Apollon, which houses France’s crown jewels, French officials said.
Once inside the opulent gallery, the thieves calmly smashed display cases containing Napoleonic and royal jewelry, officials said. Then, as quickly as they had entered, the thieves exited, fleeing on a motorcycle via the roads along the Seine River. The whole heist took seven minutes.
Left behind outside was one piece of jewelry, damaged and apparently dropped accidentally as the thieves sped away, officials said.
No one was injured. Officials said they are trying to establish the full list of stolen artifacts, but that the speed and precision of the crime suggests experienced criminals who had spent time planning the heist.
“It was clearly a team that had done some reconnaissance, was clearly also very experienced and acting very, very quickly,” French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said on French radio.
By Sunday afternoon, the museum had been evacuated and remained closed. Outside the Louvre, police kept spectators at a distance, but an elevator and truck were still visible.
The brazen burglary fuses together a long French history of high-profile art thefts and spectacular jewelry heists.
Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by an Italian carpenter, only to be found two years later. In 2010, a thief broke into Paris’s Modern Art Museum and made off with more than $120 million of artworks, including some from Picasso and Matisse. A thief dubbed Spider-Man was sent to prison for the crime and later appeared in a Netflix documentary.
At the same time, French braqueurs are famous here for spectacular smash-and-grab robberies of jewelry stores, including two heists in 2021 and 2023 at the same store on the tony Place Vendome, just steps away from the country’s Justice Ministry. Kim Kardashian was held at gunpoint in 2016 and robbed of millions of dollars in jewels by a group of older thieves who posed as police officers and became known in the French press as the “grandpa robbers.” Some, like Kardashian’s robbers, are later caught.
On Sunday, investigators were rushing to find and identify the people behind the heist.
Investigators have “good hope” of catching the thieves by examining surveillance footage and other evidence like their abandoned motorcycle, Nunez, the interior minister, said
Nunez added that selling the jewels would be impossible on the open market, adding: “It could only interest collectors, but what could they do with it?”
The heist comes as museum officials have raised alarms about a deteriorating building and weak security. Culture minister Rachida Dati said Sunday that police had given the museum a list of security recommendations that were being implemented as part of a broader renovation announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in January.
“For 40 years, there wasn’t much interest in securing these major museums,” Dati said Sunday on French TV. “Museums need to be adapted to new forms of crime.”