Eight priceless treasures from the Apollo Gallery within the world-famous Louvre have been stolen by chainsaw-wielding robbers.
Authorities are scrambling to search out the gang behind the heist of high-security display cases that were targeted within the famous French museum.
The criminals, who disguised themselves as construction staff on a cherry picker, are still on the run.
Authorities fear the one-of-a-kind, and subsequently highly recognisable items will likely be melted down and destroyed before being sold on.
There are fears that those responsible might be a component of the ‘Pink Panthers’, a gang which previously stole £23,000,000 of diamonds from Graff jewellers in London back in 2003.
Many members of the gang are ex-soldiers with extensive backgrounds in paramilitary training – could the infamous gang be behind the Louvre theft?
Members of the Pink Panthers hail from former Yugoslavian states, including Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia.
Interpol estimates that there are roughly 800 key members of the criminal network worldwide.
The Panthers have a history of targeting museums, in addition to jewellers. In 2008, a museum in Switzerland had a Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne and a Degas stolen, with an estimated value of £119,162,880.
This time around, eight objects were taken: a sapphire diadem, a necklace and a single earring from an identical set linked to Nineteenth-century French queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense; an emerald necklace and earrings from the matching set of Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife; a reliquary brooch; Empress Eugénie’s diadem; and her large corsage-bow brooch.
Security expert Will Geddes has experience in extortion, blackmail and tracking down criminals, and told Metro the Louvre robbery has the fingerprints of the Pink Panthers throughout it.
‘They’ve been involved in some really massively audacious, exciting, and daring robberies,’ he explained.
‘I feel all of this lot was stolen to order, which is why I’ve got a gut feeling it might be the Pink Panthers.
‘We all know that they’re former military, so highly disciplined, extremely well trained, and they’re going to go very much for items that are either in a short time and simply disposable or can have been robbed to order.
‘This was evidently incredibly well planned, and that’s what the Panthers do. They’ll plan these operations to the best degree, and far of it would even be all the way down to timing. We all know that when these guys went in, they didn’t go in at nighttime; they went in at 9:30 within the morning, which in itself is incredibly brave.’
‘Outrageous’ security failures
Because the Louvre reopened today, France’s Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said: ‘We failed and presented a deplorable image of France.’
Referring to France’s ‘Crown Jewels,’ Darmanin conceded that windows and display cabinets were too easily broken into, and there have been not enough CCTV cameras.
Security guards did not confront the gang, while police didn’t react to an alarm in time to arrest them. And a leaked report by France’s auditing watchdog – the Cours des Comptes – meanwhile revealed ‘consistent and chronic delays’ in bringing security up up to now on the earth’s most visited art museum.
Despite an annual operating budget of £280million, a 3rd of rooms within the Louvre’s Denton Wing – where the burglary took place – had no cameras in any respect.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Geddes told Metro. ‘It’s poor security direction and management. If I were the person answerable for the safety of that museum, I could be kicking off royally about there not being any cameras.
‘Within the place where there aren’t any cameras, that’s where you fortify with physical security guards.’
Geddes previously conducted security testing for plenty of high-profile museums within the capital, and told Metro: ‘The National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum, the Wallace Collection, the V&A – after inspecting, one in every of the things that I got here back with was that the safety was pretty bad. It was pretty poor.’
Though British museums have since upped their security after Geddes’ testing, he said there’ll all the time be ‘blind spots’.
‘You frequently only discover what those blind spots are once you’ve actually had an actual compromise or an incident like this happen,’ he added.
The period of time the burglars took inside – just seven minutes – is an ‘exceptionally’ long time frame for a robbery, Geddes said.
‘This shows the high level of planning of those individuals to go, ‘Great, we will do that.’ There are only too many component parts, which lead me to imagine this is not any bizarre crew. This can be a highly organised crew.’
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