Authorities will likely only have a couple of weeks to recover the jewellery stolen in a brazen daylight heist of the famed Louvre museum in Paris, an art detective says.
Thieves used a basket lift to gain access to the Apollon gallery, smashing display cases, taking eight priceless Napoleonic pieces and fleeing on scooters.
The entire heist took just seven minutes.
Art detective Arthur Brand told Breakfast the suspects are likely to lay low for a couple of weeks, while police and media attention is at a frenzy.
“It's a race against time,” he said.
“If they catch them within one or two weeks, they might have a chance to get these items back.
“If it takes longer, in many of these cases you catch the thieves, but you'll never find the loot.”
Brand has earned the moniker of “the Indiana Jones of the art world”, after recovering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stolen art over his career, and described the Louvre incident as the “heist of the decade”.
“If you steal art, you cannot cut it down. You have to keep it in one piece. With these pieces like gold, silver, diamonds, you can dismantle them. You can melt down the gold, you can melt down the silver.
“Some of these crowns had hundreds of diamonds, so if you dismantle them and you sell them separately, it's very hard to link them to this heist.”
Read more: Here's a look at other famous museum heists as thieves hit the Louvre
Brand believes the thieves were planning this for years, but only recently saw the opportunity to strike.
“Recently, they started construction work there and that was their chance. They [were] disguised as construction workers with yellow jackets, they had a mechanical ladder with them.
“So they fit in and probably most people thought that they are just working here.”
The robbery came just four months after Louvre staff walked off the job, complaining that overcrowding and understaffing had spread security resources too thin.
Brand says museums have less protection than jewellery shops, making them an easier target.
“Museums don't have the money… so it's easier to go to a museum than to rob something else.
“But having said that, to target the Louvre, you know, nobody would have thought that it would be possible.”
The morning's headlines in 90 seconds, including a massive outage breaks the internet, weather warnings and watched in force, more allegations levelled against Prince Andrew. (Source: 1News)
However, he says all hope for catching the robbers and recovering the jewels is not lost.
“They left some DNA, most likely. They left some pieces there. These are professional criminals, so that DNA must be somewhere in the system,” he said.
“The other lead is that there's so much media attention, so the possibility that somebody wants to take this in to melt it down or to touch these diamonds, I think it's very low.
“I think that these thieves underestimated the panic.”
The Louvre remains closed as police investigate.
SHARE ME