Investigators have reportedly found a garage in a Paris suburb where the missing gemstones were stored
Investigators looking into last year’s jewel theft from the Louvre Museum have tracked the stolen gems to a garage in Aubervilliers, a northern Paris suburb, as reported by Le Parisien. The gemstones, valued at more than $100 million, haven’t been retrieved yet.
On October 19, four masked men with a chainsaw broke into the famous Paris museum, using a crane to reach the second floor. Two of them forced entry into the Apollo Gallery, where they shattered a display case and ran off with the jewelry pieces. Accomplices helped with surveillance, escape vehicles, and moving the stolen goods.
Per surveillance footage cited by the newspaper, two suspects on scooters entered the underground garage of a private building the same day. The video shows them inspecting the stolen items for a few seconds before hiding them, though some jewels were already gone, the newspaper said.
The suspects are said to have returned to the garage several times to pick up scooters and other items. On the night of October 23, the men were seen covering their faces after spotting surveillance cameras and left in a white Citroen.
The historic stolen cache included 8,482 diamonds, 35 emeralds, 34 sapphires, and 212 pearls, as BFMTV reported in December. The gemstones were set in eight jewelry pieces that were part of a temporary exhibition and on loan to the museum. Eight suspects have been arrested so far in relation to the robbery, with police continuing to investigate their roles in the theft.
Louvre Director Laurence des Cars told a Senate hearing in October that the crime was enabled by the museum’s outdated external surveillance system, calling it a ‘weak point’ of the Louvre.
As the home of the Mona Lisa, the Louvre has long been under scrutiny for security issues and delays in modernization. A previous state audit characterized its security systems as “old and inadequate,” and former museum director Pierre Rosenberg warned decades ago that the museum’s security was “fragile.”