Six people have been arrested after thieves used explosives and military-grade weapons to break into a laboratory in Lyon that deals with precious metals, including gold, in the latest, brazen daytime heist to hit France.
Police said that the minutes-long raid, which took place on Thursday, had briefly allowed thieves to get away with an estimated €12m (£10.5m) in loot. At the time, 28 employees were present at Laboratoires Pourquery, five of whom were slightly injured.
Residents described hearing a deafening noise. “They blew out two security windows in the laboratory,” one witness told the newspaper Le Progrès. “There were several men, perhaps three or four, carrying Kalashnikovs and fake armbands … we saw them load their vehicle, a small van, before fleeing.”
Video taken by residents appeared to show two people, dressed all in black, hovering near a white van parked outside the laboratory. One calmly tossed a ladder over the fence, while another brandished what appears to be an assault rifle. Soon after, another person is seen scaling the ladder to throw parcels over the fence. Police did not detail what exactly was taken from the laboratory.
The suspects, believed to be seasoned criminals, were detained shortly afterwards in the neighbouring town of Vénissieux, a source close to the case told Agence France-Presse. A woman, described by police as an accomplice to the robbery, was also arrested, while assault rifles, handguns and explosives were seized.
Media reported that it was the second time thieves had targeted the laboratory, following an attempted robbery in May.
The heist in Lyon comes days after thieves carried out a flagrant raid on the Louvre, breaking into one of the museum’s most ornate rooms and escaping with crown jewels worth an estimated €88m (£76m). Seven people have since been arrested, but the stolen gems, which include an emerald and diamond necklace that Napoleon I gave to his second wife, Marie Louise, and a diadem set with 212 pearls and nearly 2,000 diamonds that had once belonged to Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, have yet to be recovered.
The robbery at the world’s most-visited museum – the biggest since the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 – left much of the world reeling at its audacity and prompted a reckoning in France, with the Louvre director acknowledging there was “highly insufficient” security camera coverage of the outside walls of the vast building.
As the frantic search for the gems continue, a spotlight has been recast on the spate of robberies targeting precious metals across the country. Last month, thieves – believed to be using an angle grinder and a blowtorch – forced their way into Paris’s Natural History Museum, making off with historic gold samples with a street value of €600,000. Prosecutors said recently that a 24-year-old Chinese national had been arrested in Barcelona.
In early October, a museum in Mialet, a small village in southern France, reported that about 100 gold Huguenot crosses had been stolen. And less than 24 hours after the Louvre heist, the small town of Langres said that several silver and gold coins had gone missing from a collection dating from 1790 to 1840.
On Friday, the count of Paris, whose great-grandmother once wore the sapphire tiara that was stolen from the Louvre, pleaded for the return of the jewels.
“For our family, for the French people, it’s important that these jewels return to their display case at the Louvre,” Jean d’Orleans, a direct descendant of French kings, told Reuters. “It’s priceless heritage … we need to recover that.”
