The audacious daytime robbery of historic jewels worth $102 million from the Louvre museum in Paris last month was carried out by petty criminals rather than professionals from the world of organized crime, the Paris prosecutor said on Sunday.
On a Sunday morning two weeks ago, two men parked a moving elevator outside the Louvre, climbed to the second floor, broke a window, opened shop windows with angle grinders and fled on scooters driven by two accomplices in a robbery that lasted less than seven minutes.
Three of the four alleged thieves are believed to be in prison and the jewels are still missing, but according to authorities, their profiles do not resemble those of Ocean’s Eleven-style professional gangsters, but rather those of petty criminals from the northern suburbs of Paris.
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“It’s not exactly everyday delinquency… but it’s a type of delinquency that we don’t generally associate with the high echelons of organized crime,” Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau told franceinfo radio.
She added that the profiles of the four people arrested so far – including the girlfriend of one of the robbery suspects – are not typical of organized crime professionals capable of executing complex operations.
French media speculated that the thieves were amateurs, as they dropped the most precious of jewels – Empress Eugenia’s crown, made of gold, emeralds and diamonds – during their escape, left tools and other items at the scene and were unable to set fire to the transporters’ truck before fleeing.
