Footage has emerged showing two thieves making a leisurely escape from the Louvre after stealing €88m (£76m) of France's crown jewels. The 36-second clip, verified by the newspaper Le Parisien, was apparently filmed from a nearby window in the museum and shows the men descending on a furniture lift from the Apollo gallery.
In the video, one of the two men is dressed in black with a yellow hi-vis vest, while the other wears a motorcycle helmet. They can be seen slowly riding the lift down towards the Quai François Mitterrand, where earlier a stolen truck with a 30-metre extendable ladder and basket lift had been parked to access the first-floor gallery.
Audio on the clip captures a voice, possibly a security guard's, speaking into a walkie-talkie: “The individuals are on scooters… They are going to leave, they are going to leave.” Moments later, the men are seen departing on two scooters, with another voice exclaiming: “Damn, there we go – the police.”
The heist took place on Sunday morning shortly after the museum opened. Two of a four-man gang smashed an apparently unsecured window and used disc cutters to open two display cases, making off with eight pieces including an emerald and diamond necklace given by Napoleon I to his second wife, Marie Louise, and a diadem belonging to Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. The entire operation is estimated to have lasted less than seven minutes, with the two men inside the gallery for 3 minutes and 58 seconds.
France's interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, has said more than 100 investigators are working on the case. Questioned by senators on Wednesday, the museum's director, Laurence des Cars, acknowledged a “terrible failure”, admitting that security camera coverage of the building's outside walls was “highly insufficient”.
