Louvre Heist Suspects: ‘We Could Have Taken More’

New details have emerged about the €88 million theft of French crown jewels from Paris’s Louvre museum in October last year, including claims that an unnamed “mastermind” organised the heist, but was left disappointed by the amount taken.

According to reporting by Le Monde, in transcripts of interviews with two investigating judges, two men charged with the high-profile crime allege that they were following orders from a third party who commissioned the operation. The pair said they would not name this person out of fear of reprisals, according to the French newspaper.

The smash-and-grab heist garnered global attention last year after thieves used a furniture lift mounted to a truck to access a balcony at the world-famous museum, before smashing a window to enter the gallery and using angle grinders to access the display cases. Videos showing suspects wearing high-vis vests descending slowly on the arm of the furniture lift before absconding on scooters soon went viral, highlighting security vulnerabilities at the museum.

Days after the burglary, the museum’s president, Laurence des Cars, acknowledged a “terrible failure” and admitted that security camera coverage was “highly inadequate”. She resigned from her post in February this year.

The two suspects, who now claim they were acting on behalf of another, hail from the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers and were arrested a week after the crime. They are now in prison awaiting trial for organised gang theft.

In the interviews obtained by Le Monde, which were conducted in June, both suspects alleged that they were recruited a couple of days ahead of the crime and had received a video filmed inside the Apollo Gallery showing the location of the jewel cases they were to target. 

Investigators have cautioned that they do not yet have any hard evidence, such as digital communications, to support the existence of this alleged mastermind, Le Monde reported. Neither the public prosecutor’s office nor lawyers representing the two men responded to Ocula’s requests for comment.

According to Le Monde, in an interview with judges, a suspect named locally as Abdoulaye N is reported to have said: “We were meant to take as many jewels as we could. If we stayed more than three minutes, we knew we had to leave or we’d get caught.”

The 40-year-old, who worked as an unlicensed taxi driver, reportedly claimed he was recruited because of his reputation for riding motorcycles, and that he had accepted the job because he was in financial difficulty and was promised between €15,000 and €20,000. Reportedly, he alleged that the objective of the plan’s main architect was to resell the jewels, and that his fee could be raised depending on what they were sold for.

The other suspect, a 36-year-old man of Algerian descent identified only as Ghelamallah A, reportedly said he did not know the Louvre was the intended target, instead believing he was targeting a jewellery store and would be paid between €20,000 and €25,000 for the job. He is quoted as saying: “I would never have set foot there if I had known.”

Abdoulaye N, meanwhile, is quoted as claiming that the stolen jewels were handed over in an underground car park in Aubervilliers. “The mastermind was not happy. He thought we could have taken more,” he is reported to have said. Both suspects insisted they had no knowledge of what happened to the jewellery afterwards, according to Le Monde. 

The handover is corroborated by grainy security footage from a car park surveillance camera around an hour after the heist, which is, according to Le Monde, where the police trail for the jewels runs cold.