It starts filtering its first results. Two of the five people arrested on Wednesday night as part of the investigation into the robbery at the Louvre were charged on Saturday, while three were released, according to police sources close to the case and sources close to the case, as reported by the French press. The jewels cannot be sold on the market, but their value, according to the prosecution, would be around 88 million euros and it is feared that they may have already been dismantled to be sold separately.
Among those charged is a 38-year-old woman, arrested on Wednesday along with four other suspects in the investigation, and her entry into preventive detention has been ordered. The suspect, a resident of La Courneuve (Seine-Saint-Denis), was accused of complicity in robbery in an organized gang and association of criminals for criminal purposes.
The five recent arrests, announced on Thursday by Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, are in addition to those of two men in their thirties arrested a week earlier, suspected of having been part of the four-person commando that carried out the robbery.
These two men, residents of Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis), aged 34 and 39, were charged and provisionally detained on Wednesday night. One was detained at Roissy airport, when he was trying to fly to Algeria, and the other in Aubervilliers (he was trying to flee to Mali). According to the prosecutor, both made “partial” statements regarding the facts that, according to the file, would be clearly proven.
Thursday’s arrests “were not at all related to the statements” of the two defendants, but rather to “other elements in the file,” such as traces of DNA, video surveillance recordings or the analysis of telephone communications, the prosecutor said Thursday.
Laure Beccuau stressed her “determination”, as well as that of the hundreds of investigators mobilized, to recover the loot and arrest all of the criminals involved. Regarding the stolen jewelry, the prosecutor explained that the Central Office to Combat Trafficking in Cultural Property (OCBC) is exploring “a series of parallel markets,” since they will probably not reappear in the legal art market.
Among the researchers’ hypotheses is the possibility that these jewels serve as merchandise for money laundering operations or even as a means of negotiation in the criminal world, Beccuau also noted.
armed with simple radials and took the jewels in broad daylight. A set of 8,700 diamonds, 34 sapphires, 38 emeralds and more than 200 pearls, a synthesis of centuries of French political history.
The Louvre has now moved some of its most valuable jewels from that same gallery to the Bank of France, which stores the country’s gold reserves in a huge vault located 27 meters underground, and which is just 500 meters from the museum.
director of the museum, to appear. He assumed his responsibility, admitted obvious failures, especially in non-existent video surveillance outside. “It is an immense wound, we have failed,” he assumed. But, somehow, she came to say that she herself had already warned of the aging of the infrastructure. He also asked to build a police station inside the museum.
