Louvre heist the work of petty criminals, not professional organised crime: prosecutor

Paris: The audacious daylight robbery of jewels worth €88 million ($157 million) from the Paris Louvre museum was executed by small-time criminals rather than professionals from the world of organised crime, the Paris prosecutor said on Monday AEDT.

Laure Beccuau said one of the suspects, aged 37, had 10 convictions for theft, but his profile didn’t match that of a high-level organised criminal, Le Parisien reported.

“What we are seeing now is that profiles not necessarily well known in organised crime are moving quite quickly to extremely serious offences,” Beccau said.

Meanwhile, France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said the jewels might have been transported overseas.

“There are several hypotheses regarding the goods, including that they may already have been moved abroad,” he said.

“But I remain confident that they can be recovered.”

Not Ocean’s Eleven-style gangsters

Beccau told Franceinfo radio on Sunday (Monday AEDT) the four suspects in custody so far – including the girlfriend of one of the suspected robbers – were locals from a poor area and were not typical of organised crime professionals adept at executing complex operations.

“They all live more or less in Seine-Saint-Denis,” she said, referring to a low-income area north of Paris.

French media had earlier speculated that the robbers were amateurs, as they dropped the most precious of the jewels – Empress Eugenie’s crown, made of gold, emerald and diamonds – during their getaway, left tools and other items at the scene, and failed to set fire to the movers’ truck before fleeing.

A week after the robbery, police arrested two men suspected of being the ones who broke into the Louvre – a 34-year-old Algerian who has lived in France since 2010 and was detained by police as he tried to board a flight to Algeria, and a 39-year-old already under judicial supervision for aggravated theft.

Both live in Aubervilliers, in northern Paris, and have “partially admitted” their involvement, Beccuau said last week. Two more suspects, a 37-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, were arrested on October 29 and charged on Saturday.

‘At least’ one person still missing from heist group

Beccuau said the 37-year-old man was believed to be part of the four-man group that carried out the heist, based on DNA found in the moving truck.

She said he had criminal convictions for a range of offences, including traffic-related offences, aggravated theft and an attempt to break into an automated teller machine.

She added that he was in a relationship with the 38-year-old woman and that they had children together, and that he and one of the two other men arrested had been convicted of the same robbery in 2015.

Traces of the woman’s DNA were also found in the movers’ truck, but Beccuau said these DNA traces seemed to have been transferred into the truck, possibly by a person or an object later put into the vehicle.

The prosecutor’s office said on Saturday that both denied involvement in the heist.

Beccau said the suspects’ profiles did not resemble Ocean’s Eleven-style professional gangsters. Instead, they were small-time criminals from the hard-scrabble northern suburbs of Paris.

Asked whether authorities believed that three of the four thieves were now under arrest, Beccuau said that “at least one person is still missing”. She did not rule out there being other accomplices.

Three people who had been arrested along with the couple on October 29 had been freed without charge, the prosecutor’s office said on Saturday.

With Reuters

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