French police have arrested two suspects believed to have helped steal crown jewels worth an estimated €88m (£76m) from the Louvre museum in Paris, officials have said, a week after one of the country’s most spectacular heists in decades.
The Paris public prosecutor confirmed media reports on Sunday that one man had been detained at about 10pm (8pm UK time) on Saturday at the capital’s Charles de Gaulle airport by officers from the armed robberies and serious burglaries squad.
The prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, did not confirm how many arrests had been made nor whether any jewels had been recovered, but officials close to the investigation told French media a second suspect had been taken into custody in the Paris region.
Beccuau said she regretted the premature revelation of the arrests in multiple media outlets, saying it “could only jeopardise the work of more than 100 investigators mobilised to recover the stolen jewels and apprehend all of the perpetrators”.
She said it was too early to give further details but she would say more once the suspects’ pre-charge custody period was over. Under French law, people suspected of committing serious crimes can be detained for up to 96 hours before being charged.
Multiple French media outlets said the man detained at the airport had been about to board a plane to Algeria. Paris Match said the second, who was arrested at roughly the same time in the Seine-Saint-Denis department near Paris, planned to travel to Mali.
Both suspects were reportedly in their 30s, known to police and had criminal records for robbery. Le Monde said they had been under observation “for some time” before being taken into custody on suspicion of “organised theft and criminal conspiracy”.
Citing police sources, France Inter public radio reported that the pair were from Seine-Saint-Denis, north-east of Paris, the department listed by the national statistics office as having highest poverty and crime rates in mainland France.
The men were identified from forensic analysis of items that were abandoned at the scene, including gloves, a high-vis vest, a motorbike helmet, angle grinders and other power tools, a blow-torch and a walkie-talkie.
The French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, on Sunday sent his “warmest congratulations” to the investigators who he said had “worked tirelessly”, but also called for confidentiality so as not to hamper the work of the detectives.
Beccuau said on Friday that more than 150 DNA samples, fingerprints and other traces on objects found at the scene were being analysed in forensic laboratories and that she was “optimistic” about the investigation’s outcome.
The four men pulled up outside the world’s most visited museum at about 9.30am last Sunday in a stolen furniture removal truck fitted with an extending ladder and lift, in which two of them mounted to the ornate first-floor Apollo gallery.
Wearing hi-vis vests to resemble maintenance workers, they smashed an unsecured window and used disc cutters to open two display cases before descending in the bucket lift and fleeing on motorbikes driven by the other two men.
The brazen heist lasted less than seven minutes, with the two who entered the gallery, which houses France’s surviving royal gems, spending just three minutes and 58 seconds inside.
They dropped a diamond and emerald-studded crown during their getaway, but fled with eight richly gem-encrusted pieces that Beccuau said last week were worth “a spectacular sum, nearly €90m, but nothing compared to their historical value”.
The jewels included an emerald and diamond necklace that Napoleon I gave his second wife, Marie Louise, and a diadem set with 212 pearls and nearly 2,000 diamonds that had once belonged to the empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III.
Originally built in the late 12th century, the Louvre palace was once the official residence of the French monarchs until Louis XIV abandoned it for Versailles. It became a museum for the royal art collection in 1793, four years after the French Revolution.
The museum, which stands on a 37-hectare (91 acre) site along the north bank of the river Seine in central Paris, houses a vast collection of masterpieces including the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo statue. It was visited by 8.7 million people last year.
Nuñez expressed his “concern for the jewellery” in an interview with the French weekly La Tribune Dimanche on Sunday, saying the heist appeared to have been carried out by an organised crime group but adding that “thieves are always eventually caught”.
The interior minister said there was a risk the jewellery would be broken up, with its precious metal settings melted down and the gems sold separately. “The loot is unfortunately often stashed abroad. I hope that’s not the case – I remain confident,” he added.
While the museum’s internal alarms functioned normally, with a first going off at 9.34am when the robbers smashed the balcony window looking on to the Quai François Mitterrand, the museum’s director has acknowledged a security blindspot.
Laurence des Cars told French senators last week that external security cameras did not adequately cover the thieves’ access point, with the only camera installed near the Apollo gallery pointed in the wrong direction to cover the window.
However, Des Cars defended the museum’s €80m security programme, saying security camera coverage was being increased across the entire site, including “video surveillance covering all facades”.
France’s culture minister, Rachida Dati, said on social media on Friday that she had requested findings from an investigation into the Louvre’s security by early next week in order to “announce concrete measures to secure” the museum.
