Suspects arrested over theft of jewels, prosecutor says

Two suspects have been arrested over the theft of precious crown jewels from Paris’s Louvre museum, French media say.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said one of the men had been taken into custody as he was preparing to take a flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Items worth €88m (£76m; $102m) were taken from the world’s most-visited museum last Sunday, when four thieves wielding power tools broke into the building in broad daylight.

France’s justice minister has conceded security protocols “failed”, leaving the country with a “terrible image”.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement that the arrests had been made on Saturday evening, without specifying how many people had been taken into custody.

One of the suspects was preparing to travel to Algeria, police sources have told French media, while it is understood the other was going to Mali.

Specialist police can detain and question them for up to 96 hours.

According to reports in French media on Sunday, DNA found at the scene of the robbery lead to the identification of one of the suspects.

The gang left behind a number of items, including gloves and a high-vis jacket. It has previously been reported that they also dropped a crown that once belonged to Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III.

The Paris prosecutor criticised the “premature disclosure” of information related to the case, adding that it hindered efforts to recover the jewels and find the thieves.

The thieves reportedly arrived at 09:30 (08:30 GMT), shortly after the museum opened to visitors.

The suspects arrived with a vehicle-mounted mechanical lift to gain access to the Galerie d’Apollon (Gallery of Apollo) via a balcony close to the River Seine.

Pictures from the scene showed the ladder leading up to a first-floor window.

Two of the thieves entered by cutting through the window with power tools.

They then threatened the guards, who evacuated the premises, and cut through the glass of two display cases containing jewels.

A preliminary report has revealed that one in three rooms in the area of the museum raided had no CCTV cameras, according to French media.

French police say the thieves were inside for four minutes and made their escape on two scooters waiting outside at 09:38.

The museum’s director told French senators this week that the only camera monitoring the exterior wall of the Louvre where they broke in was pointing away from the first-floor balcony that led to Gallery of Apollo.

CCTV around the perimeter was also weak and “ageing”, Laurence des Cars said, meaning that staff failed to spot the gang early enough to stop the theft.

Experts have also expressed concern that the jewels may have already been broken up into hundreds of pieces.

Gold and silver can be melted down and the gems can be cut up into smaller stones that will be virtually impossible to track back to the robbery, Dutch art detective Arthur Brand told the BBC.

Security measures have since been tightened around France’s cultural institutions.

The Louvre has transferred some of its most precious jewels to the Bank of France following the heist. They will now be stored in the Bank’s most secure vault, 26m (85ft) below the ground floor of its elegant headquarters in central Paris.