One year after a brazen break-in at the Louvre Museum in Paris, the four main suspects are in jail awaiting trial, but the eight priceless jewels stolen during the heist remain missing.
The stolen treasures include a crown and a brooch belonging to Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III. Despite the arrests, police appear to have exhausted their leads in the search for the jewels. French President Emmanuel Macron described the robbery as an attack on France’s history.
The heist was carried out by thieves dressed as workmen. According to NBC News, they entered the museum in broad daylight with industrial-grade disc cutters and stole eight 19th-century jewels, estimated to be worth $100 million, in just seven minutes before escaping on two scooters.
Experts from law enforcement and private art recovery agencies reportedly believe the jewels are more likely to be recovered if the thieves acted independently and concealed them somewhere in the Paris region. “There was a short period of time when they may have hidden them in a wall or buried them,” Christopher Marinello of private agency Art Recovery International told AFP.
All four men were arrested within 10 days of the heist.
{{/usCountry}}All four men were arrested within 10 days of the heist.
{{/usCountry}}The jewels were last seen on CCTV footage recorded in an underground lock-up in the Aubervilliers suburb of northern Paris, where the suspects live. The 100-strong investigation team has conducted extensive searches of the suspects’ homes and their family members’ homes, as well as cellars, garages and attics, but to no avail.
Renowned Dutch private art detective Arthur Brand said that if the jewels had been hidden or handed to a “fence” for safekeeping, there was still a chance that one of the suspects might confess in exchange for a more lenient sentence.
“The French police are very professional, they know how to interrogate, they know how to put pressure on (someone),” he told AFP.
“You only need one to talk, and in many cases, one talks.”
Was there a mastermind?
The group may have been acting on the orders of a mastermind or middleman with links to organised crime, to whom they handed over the jewels after the theft.
According to The Guardian, two of the suspects reportedly told investigators that the alleged mastermind behind the heist was disappointed with the haul and thought “they could have taken more”. However, investigators have treated claims that a mastermind was part of the operation with scepticism, a source close to the case told AFP.
“The power of organised crime is not only to bring the experience to commit a crime, but also to have people to take the objects and sell them,” said Corrado Catesi, head of Interpol’s stolen art unit.
Another possibility is that the jewels have been transported out of France or handed over to a local contact involved in the illicit precious-stones trade.
“It’s mainly diamonds, so they have to dismantle them, recut them and sell them. If they would go to one place, it would be Antwerp,” Brand said, referring to the Belgian diamond hub.
Marinello identified Tel Aviv and India as other possible destinations.
Tobias Kormind, managing director of 77 Diamonds, Europe’s largest online diamond jeweller, told AFP that “once recut, re-entering the legitimate supply chain to be bought by wholesalers or retailers is fairly straightforward”.
“Unless a stone possessed ultra-distinctive internal inclusions, even top diamond laboratories like the GIA would struggle to flag a freshly polished diamond as stolen property,” he said.
Is there any chance of recovering the jewels?
According to Brand, there may still be a chance of recovering the jewels, even if they have fallen into the hands of an organised crime group.
He cited several cases in which stolen valuables were eventually recovered, including the 2022 theft at the TEFAF art fair in the Netherlands and the 2019 break-in at the Grünes Gewölbe museum in Dresden, Germany.
“Although we all think that most of the gold, silver and diamonds that get stolen, we never see them back, in some cases, we do,” he explained.
“There is still a chance that we will see the Louvre jewels again and it might be that somebody talks before the court case.”
The jewels remain listed as missing in Interpol’s database of stolen artworks.
Corrado Catesi told AFP that investigations into stolen artefacts worldwide show that their recovery can take anywhere from three months to 40 years.
(With inputs from AFP)