PARIS: French authorities on Tuesday arrested four more people in the probe into last month’s spectacular daylight theft of imperial jewels from the Louvre museum, the top Paris prosecutor said.

“They are two men aged 38 and 39, and two women aged 31 and 40, all from the Paris region,” Laure Beccuau said, following earlier charges against four others over the heist.

On October 19, a four-person gang raided the Louvre, the world’s most-visited art museum, in broad daylight, taking just seven minutes to steal jewellery worth an estimated $102 million before fleeing on scooters.

The thieves parked a moving truck with a ladder below the museum’s Apollo Gallery housing the French crown jewels, ascended in a bucket, broke a window, and used angle grinders to cut into glass display booths containing the treasures.

The four already charged over the theft include three men and a woman.

One of those men, a 37-year-old, was in a couple with the woman and they have children, Beccuau said earlier this month.

The couple was arrested after their DNA was found in the basket lift used during the robbery.

The man’s criminal record contained 11 previous convictions, most of them for theft.

The thieves dropped a diamond- and emerald-studded crown that once belonged to Empress Eug­enie, the wife of Napoleon III, as they escaped. But they made off with eight other items of jewellery, including an emerald-and-diamond necklace that Napoleon I gave his second wife, Empress Marie-Louise.

Published in Dawn, November 26th, 2025