Paris — French authorities may well manage to track down and arrest the thieves who pulled off an audacious robbery of royal crown jewels from Paris’ iconic Louvre museum, but they’re unlikely to recover the national treasures, a criminologist told CBS News on Tuesday. The heist took place on Sunday, in broad daylight with tourists in the museum, but nobody was hurt.
“We will catch them,” Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at France’s National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, told CBS News.
But he added: “I don’t think we will capture the jewels.”
Bauer said a lot of DNA was left at the scene by the robbers, including on the crown of the empress Eugénie, which was left behind by the thieves as they made their getaway on motorcycles.
French police also recovered a large crane lift used by the thieves to access an upper floor window of the 230-year-old museum, along with a power saw, gloves, a walkie-talkie and a can of gasoline. Authorities have said the criminals may have intended to use the gas to burn their tools, but they ran out of time.
The criminals entered from the back side of the Louvre’s main building on Sunday — away from the main entrance with its famous glass pyramid — before cutting their way through a window using the power lift and saw. They then made their way straight for the Galerie d’Apollon, the large hall that housed the crown jewels.
If the thieves were professional criminals, they may well be known to the police, with information available on French law enforcement databases, Bauer told CBS News.
But “if they’re amateur, or in the middle, under control or subcontracted by somebody else, it may be a little more complicated,” he said.
What are the jewels stolen from the Louvre worth?
The stolen French crown jewels are priceless in historical terms, but experts have told CBS News they would still be worth millions of dollars if broken up and sold on the black market.
One of the stolen items is a tiara featuring 212 pearls and nearly 2,000 diamonds, commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III to celebrate his marriage to Eugénie de Montijo in 1853. Also swiped: a sapphire-and-diamond tiara and necklace set, a large diamond brooch, and an emerald necklace and earrings that were originally a wedding gift from Napoleon to his second wife, Empress Marie-Louise of Austria, in 1810.
