There is a “small hope” of recovering the $102 million worth of jewels stolen from the Louvre on October 19, says one of the lead investigators.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, whose office is leading the case, told Ouest-France on Thursday that she felt “optimistic” about the investigation.
“The media coverage of this organized robbery gives me a small hope that the perpetrators won’t dare move too much with the jewels, and that we can therefore find them if we manage to move quickly,” explained the prosecutor, 65. “I want to be optimistic.”
The team of four thieves successfully stole eight pieces of Napoleonic jewelry from the world’s most-visited museum on Sunday by dressing as construction workers and using a furniture elevator to sneak in through a balcony.
Just after 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, 30 minutes after the museum opened for the day, the thieves cut through the balcony’s window with an angle grinder, entering the Apollon Gallery, which contains the royal jewels. They stole nine items, including a tiara and brooch from Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, but lost her imperial crown in the scuffle, leaving with eight pieces.
Bystanders filmed the group exiting the museum on the same furniture elevator just seven minutes after entering, then escaping on motorbikes. They briefly attempted to destroy their equipment by setting fire to the furniture elevator, but were unsuccessful.
Beccuau says the reason she is optimistic is because investigators have already recovered “more than 150 samples of DNA, papillary, and other traces,” as well as the robbers’ abandoned equipment, including a helmet, vest, gloves, and angle grinders, which they are testing for fingerprints.
Beccuau’s team of roughly 100 investigators has also recovered substantial surveillance footage from neighboring buildings, which Beccuau says her investigators have used to trace the thieves’ escape route. However, the Apollon Gallery itself did not have security cameras when the heist took place.
The Louvre has maintained that its existing security systems operated as normal, including an alarm that went off when the robbers entered the gallery. However, museum employees fled after discovering the robbers in the Apollon Gallery.
Louvre Director Laurence Des Cars, who attempted to resign but was rejected, called the heist a “terrible failure” for the museum. The museum closed after the incident, but reopened on October 22.
Beccuau told Ouest-France that investigators are now moving quickly out of fear that the highly recognizable items will be broken down and sold as individual stones. She also said she’d be investigating the possibility that the heist was an inside job.
“We obviously want to arrest the perpetrators as quickly as possible to recover the jewelry before their stones are possibly removed and the metals melted down,” she told the outlet. “The possibility of complicity within the museum will be studied.”
Beccuau added that the heist bears “all the marks of an organization: the careful preparation, the audacity of the modus operandi, the type of jewelry targeted, the escape.”
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