French authorities have arrested four more people in connection with last month’s spectacular heist of an estimated €88m (£77m) worth of crown jewels from the Louvre, the Paris prosecutor has said.
“They are two men aged 38 and 39, and two women aged 31 and 40, all from the Paris region,” Laure Beccuau said. French media said the arrests included the last remaining alleged member of the four-person gang who broke into the museum.
Citing police sources, Le Parisien newspaper said the suspected thief had been detained on Tuesday morning by anti-gang squad officers and was being held at police headquarters. He faced charges of organised theft and criminal conspiracy.
The suspect had a criminal record and was linked to the three alleged members of the gang who had already been arrested and were under formal investigation, all of whom had ties to the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers, Le Parisien said.
The alleged thieves parked a stolen truck outside the museum and used an extendable ladder and freight lift to reach the first-floor window of the Apollo gallery in the 19 October theft, one of the most spectacular heists in recent French history.
Two people smashed an unsecured window and two glass display cases in the gallery before descending in the lift and fleeing on motorbikes driven by two others in a brazen daylight heist that lasted less than seven minutes from start to finish.
The gang fled with eight pieces, including an emerald and diamond necklace that Napoleon Bonaparte gave to his second wife, Marie Louise, and a tiara set with 212 pearls and nearly 2,000 diamonds that once belonged to the wife of Napoleon III.
None of the jewels have so far been recovered. DNA analysis of items left at the scene, which included gloves, a hi-vis vest and disc cutters, led to the arrest a week later of the pair suspected of entering the museum, identified as Ayed G and Abdoulaye N.
A third man, Slimane K, who is suspected of having driven one of the two scooters used in the theft, was detained several days later. One of the men arrested on Tuesday is thought to be the second driver and fourth member of the team.
A fifth suspect accused of helping the gang has also already been charged. France’s state auditor this month called the theft “a deafening wake-up call” for the “wholly inadequate pace” of security upgrades at the world’s most visited museum.
The Louvre’s management has accepted “most” of the auditor’s conclusions. An administrative inquiry into the theft highlighted a “chronic, structural underestimation of the risk of intrusion and theft” and “inadequate security”.
