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Thieves have stolen royal jewellery of “inestimable” historical value from Paris’s Louvre museum, the French interior ministry said, in a heist that shuttered one of the world’s most famous attractions for the day.
The robbers stole from the museum’s Galerie d’Apollon, which houses its royal jewel collections, on Sunday morning, according to the ministry. The value of the seized items is still being ascertained.
“Beyond their market value, the goods have an inestimable heritage and historical value,” the ministry said.
Culture minister Rachida Dati said on X that no one was injured in the incident, and police were on the scene investigating the break-in.
The interior ministry said the thieves arrived on scooters and entered through a window they had broken. According to the AFP, they had small chainsaws and used a goods lift to enter the room at about 9.30am.
Le Parisien reported that the thieves secured “nine pieces from the jewellery collection of Napoleon” and his empress. The paper said later on Sunday that two of the artefacts had been found, including the crown of Empress Eugénie, which was found broken outside the museum.
The Financial Times could not immediately confirm the number or nature of the stolen pieces.
The museum said on X that it would remain closed for the day “for exceptional reasons”.
The Louvre, which houses thousands of treasures including Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” has been robbed before, notably in 1911 when the famous painting was stolen by a handyman. It was recovered and returned two years later.
Most of the museum’s art and artefacts were also hidden away by staff during the second world war Nazi occupation of France in a bid to prevent looting and damage from bombings.
Confirmed thefts from within the highly secure museum are rare, however. The last such incident from inside the museum complex was in 1998, according to Smithsonian magazine, when a small landscape painting was stolen.
The break-in is likely to be viewed as an embarrassment for President Emmanuel Macron after he announced a €800mn makeover plan for the Louvre earlier this year.
Macron said the works were aimed at increasing the “safety and security of the collections”, as well as upgrading the museum’s surveillance and IT systems.
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