Petty criminals – not pros – carried out the Louvre heist (French prosecutor) – National
Petty criminals carried out the heist of France’s crown jewel, the Louvre, not an organized crime network, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said, adding yet another twist to the shocking case.
“It is not a completely common delinquency (…) but it is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organized crime,” Beccuau told Franceinfo radio on Sunday.
The four suspects charged so far in the theft all lived in Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class neighborhood north of Paris, and are “clearly locals,” she said.
Two of the suspects were known to police before the robbery and had multiple convictions for theft.
One of the men is a 37-year-old who has 10 previous convictions for robberies.
Beccuau said he had “a varied criminal record, but one that would not normally suggest involvement in organized crime.” Another suspect has already been convicted twice for robbery, she added.
The two men were convicted for their involvement in the same robbery in Paris in 2015, she said.
Receive national news daily
Get the day’s top news, politics, business and current affairs headlines delivered to your inbox once a day.
On Saturday, a 38-year-old woman was charged with complicity in organized theft and criminal conspiracy with intent to commit a crime.
Beccuau said the 37-year-old man and the woman charged over the weekend were a couple and had children, but she did not provide further details.
Investigators believe four men carried out the robbery, one of whom is still at large.
Asked about the profile of the suspects, Beccuau told the radio station: “I don’t find it that surprising. What we are seeing now is that people without significant links to organized crime are progressing relatively quickly towards committing extremely serious crimes.”
On October 19, a team of four people ransacked the Louvre’s Apollon gallery in broad daylight after entering through a broken window.
The stolen jewels – a treasure valued at approximately $102 million – have not been recovered, except for one relic: Eugenie’s crown, damaged but recoverable, after the suspects dropped it during their escape.
Still missing is a diamond and emerald necklace that Napoleon gave Empress Marie-Louise as a wedding gift, as well as pieces linked to 19th-century Queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense, as well as Empress Eugénie’s pearl and diamond tiara.
Necklace and earrings from the emerald parure of Napoleon I’s second wife, Empress Marie Louise, on display in the Apollo gallery housing the royal collection of precious stones and diamonds of the French crown in Paris on May 20, 2021.
MAEVA DESTOMBES/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
It took less than eight minutes for the thieves – who used a cherry picker to scale the building’s exterior walls – to break into the world’s most visited museum, a feat the museum director called a “terrible failure”.
The criminals stole the gondola used to reach the upper floors of the building nine days before the break-in.
Security footage shows the crew climbing up to the Apollo Gallery window at 9:30 a.m. on the day of the raid. By 9:38 a.m., the suspects were gone, carrying loot, as they fled on scooters.
According to investigators, there is no evidence of inside help at the moment, but they do not rule out the existence of a broader network beyond the four suspects filmed by security cameras.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
