Louvre jewel heist investigation nets 4 more arrests, authorities say

Four more people were arrested Tuesday in the investigation into last month’s spectacular daylight heist of imperial jewels from the Louvre Museum, French authorities announced.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, whose office is heading the investigation, described the suspects as two men aged 38 and 39 and two women aged 31 and 40 from the Paris region.

Her statement didn’t say what role they’re suspected of having played in the Oct. 19 theft. Police can hold them for questioning for 96 hours.

The loot, valued at around $102 million, hasn’t been recovered. It includes a diamond-and-emerald necklace Napoleon gave to Empress Marie-Louise, jewels tied to 19th-century Queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense, and Empress Eugénie’s pearl-and-diamond tiara.

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

A police dragnet has previously caught other suspected members of the four-person team thought to have carried out the daring robbery. Investigating magistrates have filed preliminary charges against three men and one woman who were arrested last month.

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

The thieves parked a moving truck with a ladder below the museum’s Apollo Gallery housing the jewels, ascended in a bucket, broke a window and used angle grinders to cut into glass display booths containing the treasures.

One of the men already charged in the heist, a 37-year-old, was in a relationship with the woman and they have children, Beccuau said earlier this month. The couple were arrested after their DNA was found in the basket lift used during the robbery. The man’s criminal record contained 11 previous convictions, most of them for theft, she said.

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.

Last week, Louvre director Laurence des Cars revealed some new details about the security breach, saying the power tools used by robbers to cut through the display cases were meant for concrete.

“It’s a method that had not been imagined at all” when the display cases in the Apollo Gallery were replaced in 2019, she said Wednesday while telling lawmakers that new surveillance cameras and anti-intrusion systems will soon be installed at the Paris landmark. At the time, they had been designed primarily to counter an attack from inside the museum with weapons, she added.

Footage from museum cameras show that during the robbery, the display cases “held up remarkably well and did not break apart,” she said. “Videos show how difficult it was for the thieves.”

Des Cars stressed security improvement is a priority of the decade-long “Louvre New Renaissance” plan launched earlier this year, with an estimated cost of up to 800 million euros ($933 million), to modernize infrastructure, ease crowding and give the Mona Lisa a dedicated gallery by 2031.

With the Louvre crumbling under the weight of mass tourism, des Cars has restricted the daily number of visitors to 30,000 in recent years.

The famed glass pyramid inaugurated in 1989 was meant to welcome about 4 million visitors a year, she recalled. This year, already more than 8 million people have visited the Louvre.