One Year After Louvre Heist, Stolen Crown Jewels Still Missing
A year after the break-in at the Louvre Museum in Paris, in which eight items worth an estimated $100 million were stolen, the four main suspects are in jail but the jewels have not been found.
One year after a daring theft at the Louvre, the Paris art museum, police have still not located the stolen French crown jewels. The four main suspects are in jail awaiting trial, but investigators appear to have run out of leads. The eight irreplaceable items, estimated at around $100 million, remain missing.
On October 19 last year, thieves disguised as workmen entered the museum using industrial disc-cutters and escaped with the loot. It includes a brooch and a crown belonging to Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III. French President Emmanuel Macron called the robbery an attack on France's history. All four men were arrested within ten days.
Where the jewels might be
The last sighting of the 19th-century gems was on CCTV footage from an underground lock-up in Aubervilliers, a suburb in northern Paris where all the suspects live. A 100-strong investigation team has searched their homes and their families' homes, including cellars, garages and attics, without success.
Christopher Marinello of the private agency Art Recovery International told AFP the best chance is if the thieves acted alone and hid the loot in the Paris region. Corrado Catesi, head of the stolen art unit at Interpol, warned of a more worrying scenario: that the gang worked for a ringleader or middleman linked to organised crime. Two suspects have claimed a ringleader was part of their team, but investigators treat this with scepticism, a source close to the case told AFP.
In the worst case, the jewels were taken abroad or passed to contacts in the underground precious stones trade. Dutch art detective Arthur Brand said the diamonds would have to be dismantled and recut, with Antwerp in Belgium the likely place. Marinello also named Tel Aviv and India.
Hope remains
Brand pointed to cases where stolen jewels were recovered, including the 2022 raid on the TEFAF art fair in the Netherlands and the 2019 break-in at the Gruenes Gewoelbe museum in Dresden, Germany. He said one suspect could talk in exchange for a lighter sentence. The jewels remain listed as missing in Interpol's database of stolen artworks. Catesi said recovery of such objects can take from three months to 40 years.
