Crown jewels that were stolen in a dramatic weekend heist at the Louvre are worth an estimated 88 million euros, or $102 million, not including their historical value to France, the Paris prosecutor said Tuesday.
About 100 investigators are now involved in the police hunt for the gems and heist suspects, said prosecutor Laure Beccuau, whose office is leading the investigation.
“The wrongdoers who took these gems won’t earn 88 million euros if they had the very bad idea of disassembling these jewels,” she said in an interview with broadcaster RTL. “We can perhaps hope that they’ll think about this and won’t destroy these jewels without rhyme or reason.”
Questions have arisen about security at the Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum, and whether security cameras might have failed as the thieves rode a basket lift up the Louvre’s facade, cut their way through a window, smashed display cases and fled with priceless Napoleonic jewels on Sunday morning.
But France’s culture minister said Tuesday that the security apparatus installed at the Louvre worked properly during the theft.
“The Louvre museum’s security apparatus did not fail, that is a fact,” the minister, Rachida Dati, told lawmakers in the National Assembly. “The Louvre museum’s security apparatus worked.”
Dati said she launched an administrative inquiry that comes in addition to a police investigation to ensure full transparency into what happened. She did not offer any details about how the thieves managed to carry out their heist given that the cameras were working. But she described it as a painful blow for the nation.
The robbery was “a wound for all of us,” she said. “Why? Because the Louvre is far more than the world’s largest museum. It’s a showcase for our French culture and our shared patrimony.”
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Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said Monday that the museum’s alarm was triggered when the window of the Apollo Gallery was broken into.
Police officers arrived on site two or three minutes after they were called by an individual that witnessed the scene, he said on LCI television. Officials said the heist lasted less than eight minutes in total, including less than four minutes inside the Louvre.
Nuñez did not disclose details about video surveillance cameras that may have filmed the thieves around and in the museum, pending a police investigation. “There are cameras all around the Louvre,” he said.
The theft focused on the gilded Apollo Gallery, where the Crown Diamonds are displayed. Eight objects were taken, according to officials: a sapphire diadem, necklace and single earring from a matching set linked to 19th-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; and Empress Eugénie’s diadem and her large corsage-bow brooch, a prized 19th-century imperial ensemble.
Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at France’s National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, told CBS News that a lot of DNA was left at the scene by the robbers, including on the crown of the empress Eugénie, which was left behind by the thieves as they made their getaway on motorcycles.
“We will catch them,” he said of the thieves. But he added: “I don’t think we will capture the jewels.”
The crown jewels are priceless in historical terms, but experts have told CBS News they would still be worth millions of dollars if broken up and sold on the black market.
The jewels were not privately insured, the French Ministry of Culture said in a statement to the daily newspaper Le Parisien. French law prohibits entities like the Louvre from insuring its property, except when part of a collection is moved or loaned to another institution, Romain Déchelette, president of France-based Serex Assurances, a fine art insurer, told CBS News.
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