thief

PARIS — Two suspects in the Louvre jewel heist on Wednesday were handed preliminary charges of criminal conspiracy and theft committed by an organized gang, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor said they admitted their involvement.

Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said at a news conference that the two are believed to be the men who forced their way into the world’s most visited museum Oct. 19, and that at least two other accomplices are at large. The jewels remain missing.

The two were given preliminary charges and ordered held in custody pending further investigation, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

They have “partially” admitted their participation in the robbery, Beccuau said. She declined to provide details about the suspects’ statements to investigators because accomplices were still being sought.

It took thieves less than eight minutes to steal the jewels valued at $102 million on Oct. 19, shocking the world. The robbers forced open a window, cut into cases with power tools and fled with eight pieces of the French crown jewels.

Suspects’ DNA was found

The two men arrested on Saturday night “are suspected of being the ones who broke into the Apollo Gallery to steal the jewels,” Beccuau said.

One is a 34-year-old Algerian national who has been living in France since 2010, Beccuau said. He was arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport as he was about to fly to Algeria with no return ticket. He was living in a suburb north of Paris, Aubervilliers, and was known to police mostly for road traffic offenses. His DNA was found on one of the scooters used by robbers to leave the scene, she said.

The other suspect, 39, was arrested at his home in Aubervilliers. “There is no evidence to suggest that he was about to leave the country,” Beccuau said. The man was known to police for several thefts, and his DNA was found on one of the glass cases where the jewels were displayed and on items the thieves left behind, she added.

Video surveillance cameras showed there were at least four criminals involved, Beccuau said.

The four suspected robbers arrived onboard a truck equipped with a freight lift that two of them used to climb up to the museum’s window. The four left on two motor scooters along the Seine River toward eastern Paris, where they had some other vehicles parked, she said.

Beccuau said nothing suggests that the robbers had any accomplices within the museum’s staff.

The jewels are still missing

The jewels have not been recovered, Beccuau said.

“These jewels are now, of course, unsellable … Anyone who buys them would be guilty of concealment of stolen goods,” she warned. “There’s still time to give them back.”

Earlier Wednesday, French police acknowledged major gaps in the Louvre’s defenses — turning the dazzling daylight theft into a national reckoning over how France protects its treasures.

Paris Police Chief Patrice Faure told Senate lawmakers that aging systems and slow-moving fixes left weak seams in the museum.

“A technological step has not been taken,” he said, noting that parts of the video network are still analog, producing lower-quality images that are slow to share in real time.

A long-promised revamp — a $93-million project requiring roughly 37 miles of new cabling — “will not be finished before 2029-2030,” he said.

Faure also disclosed that the Louvre’s authorization to operate its security cameras quietly expired in July and wasn’t renewed — a paperwork lapse that some see as a symbol of broader negligence.

The police chief said officers “arrived extremely fast” after the theft, but added the lag in response occurred earlier in the chain — from first detection, to museum security, to the emergency line, to police command.

Faure and his team said the first alert to police came not from the Louvre’s alarms but from a cyclist outside who dialed the emergency line after seeing helmeted men with a basket lift.

Faure urged lawmakers to authorize tools currently off-limits: AI-based anomaly detection and object tracking (not facial recognition) to flag suspicious movements and follow scooters or gear across city cameras in real time.

Former bank robber David Desclos has told the AP the theft was textbook and vulnerabilities were glaringly obvious in the layout of the gallery.

Museum and culture officials under pressure

Culture Minister Rachida Dati, under pressure, has refused the Louvre director’s resignation and insisted that alarms worked, while acknowledging “security gaps did exist.”

The museum was already under strain. In June, the Louvre shut in a spontaneous staff strike — including security agents — over unmanageable crowds, chronic understaffing and “untenable” conditions. Unions say mass tourism and construction pinch points create blind spots, a vulnerability underscored by the thieves who rolled a basket lift to the Seine-facing façade.

Faure said police will now track surveillance-permit deadlines across institutions to prevent repeats of the July lapse. But he stressed the larger fix is disruptive and slow: ripping out and rebuilding core systems while the palace stays open, and updating the law so police can act on suspicious movement in real time.

Experts fear that the stolen pieces may already be broken down and stones recut to erase their past.

Adamson and Corbet write for the Associated Press.

PARIS — At least two suspects have been arrested in connection with the theft of crown jewels from Paris’ Louvre Museum, the Paris prosecutor said Sunday, a week after the heist that stunned the world.

The prosecutor said that investigators made the arrests Saturday evening, adding that one of the men taken into custody was preparing to leave the country from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.

France’s BFM TV and Le Parisien newspaper earlier reported that two suspects had been arrested and taken into custody. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau did not confirm the number of arrests and did not say whether any jewels had been recovered.

Thieves took less than eight minutes Oct. 19 to steal jewels valued at more than $100 million from the world’s most-visited museum. French officials described how the intruders used a basket lift to scale the Louvre’s facade, forced open a window, smashed display cases and fled. The museum’s director called the incident a “terrible failure.”

Beccuau said investigators from a special police unit in charge of armed robberies, serious burglaries and art thefts made the arrests. In her statement, she rued the leak of information, saying it could hinder the work of more than 100 investigators “mobilized to recover the stolen jewels and apprehend all of the perpetrators.” Beccuau said further details will be unveiled after the suspects’ custody period ends.

French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez praised “the investigators who have worked tirelessly, just as I asked them to, and who have always had my full confidence.”

The Louvre reopened last week after one of the highest-profile museum thefts of the century stunned the world with its audacity and scale.

The thieves slipped in and out while museum patrons were inside, making off with some of France’s crown jewels — a cultural wound that some compared with the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019.

The thieves escaped with eight objects, including a sapphire diadem, necklace and single earring from a set linked to 19th century queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense.

They also took an emerald necklace and earrings tied to Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife, as well as a reliquary brooch. Empress Eugénie’s diamond diadem and her large corsage-bow brooch — an imperial ensemble of rare craftsmanship — were also part of the loot.

One piece — Eugénie’s emerald-set imperial crown with more than 1,300 diamonds — was later found outside the museum, damaged but repairable.

News of the arrests was met with relief by Louvre visitors and passersby on Sunday.

“It’s important for our heritage. A week later, it does feel a bit late; we wonder how this could even happen — but it was important that the guys were caught,” said Freddy Jacquemet.

“I think the main thing now is whether they can recover the jewels,” added Diana Ramirez. “That’s what really matters.”

Petrequin and Garriga write for the Associated Press and reported from London and Paris, respectively.

PARIS — In a minutes-long strike Sunday inside the world’s most-visited museum, thieves rode a basket lift to the Louvre, forced a window into the Galerie d’Apollon — while tourists pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the corridors — smashed display cases and fled with priceless Napoleonic jewels, officials said.

It was among the highest-profile museum thefts in recent memory and comes as Louvre employees have complained of worker and security understaffing.

One object was later found outside the museum, according to Culture Minister Rachida Dati. French daily Le Parisien reported it was the emerald-studded crown of Napoleon III’s wife Empress Eugénie — gold, diamonds and sculpted eagles — recovered just beyond the walls, broken.

The theft unfolded just 270 yards from the “Mona Lisa,” in what Dati described as “a four-minute operation.” No one was hurt.

Images from the scene showed confused tourists being steered out of the glass pyramid and adjoining courtyards as officers closed nearby streets along the Seine.

Also visible was a lift braced to the Seine-facing facade near a construction zone — an extraordinary vulnerability at a palace-museum.

A museum already under strain

Around 9:30 a.m., several intruders forced a window, cut panes with a disc cutter and went straight for the vitrines, officials said. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said the crew entered from outside using a basket lift.

The choice of target compounded the shock. The vaulted Galerie d’Apollon in the Denon wing, capped by a ceiling painted for Louis XIV, displays a selection of the French Crown Jewels. The thieves are believed to have approached via the riverfront facade, where construction is underway, used a freight elevator to reach the hall, took nine pieces from a 23-item collection linked to Napoleon and the Empress, and made off on motorbikes, according to Le Parisien.

Daylight robberies during public hours are rare. Pulling one off inside the Louvre — with visitors present — ranks among Europe’s most audacious since Dresden’s Green Vault museum in 2019, and the most serious in France in more than a decade.

It also collides with a deeper tension the Louvre has struggled to resolve: swelling crowds and stretched staff. The museum delayed opening during a June staff walkout over overcrowding and chronic understaffing. Unions say mass tourism leaves too few eyes on too many rooms and creates pressure points where construction zones, freight routes and visitor flows meet.

Security around marquee works remains tight — the Mona Lisa is behind bulletproof glass in a bespoke, climate-controlled case.

It’s unclear whether staffing levels played any role in Sunday’s breach.

The Louvre has a long history of thefts and attempted robberies. The most famous came in 1911, when the Mona Lisa vanished from its frame, stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia and recovered two years later in Florence.

Today the former royal palace holds a roll call of civilization: Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa”; the armless serenity of the “Venus de Milo”; the “Winged Victory” of Samothrace, wind-lashed on the Daru staircase; the Code of Hammurabi’s carved laws; Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People”; Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa.” More than 33,000 works — from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the classical world to Europe’s masters — draw a daily tide of up to 30,000 visitors even as investigators now begin to sweep those gilded corridors for clues.

Politics at the door

The heist spilled instantly into politics. Far-right leader Jordan Bardella used it to attack President Emmanuel Macron, weakened at home and facing a fractured Parliament.

“The Louvre is a global symbol of our culture,” Bardella wrote on X. “This robbery, which allowed thieves to steal jewels from the French Crown, is an unbearable humiliation for our country. How far will the decay of the state go?”

The criticism lands as Macron touts a decade-long “Louvre New Renaissance” plan — about $800 million to modernize infrastructure, ease crowding and give the “Mona Lisa” a dedicated gallery by 2031. For workers on the floor, the relief has felt slower than the pressure.

What we know — and don’t

Forensic teams are examining the site of the crime and adjoining access points while a full inventory is taken, authorities said. Officials have described the haul as being of “inestimable” historical value.

Recovery may prove difficult. “It’s unlikely these jewels will ever be seen again,” said Tobias Kormind, managing director of 77 Diamonds. “Professional crews often break down and re-cut large, recognizable stones to evade detection, effectively erasing their provenance.”

The Louvre closed for the rest of Sunday as police sealed gates, cleared courtyards and shut nearby streets along the Seine.

Key questions still unanswered are how many people took part in the theft and whether they had inside assistance, authorities said. According to French media, there were four perpetrators: two dressed as construction workers in yellow safety vests on the lift, and two each on a scooter.

Investigators are reviewing closed-circuit TV from the Denon wing and the riverfront, inspecting the basket lift used to reach the gallery and interviewing staffers who were on site when the museum opened, authorities said.

Adamson writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.

Kelly Reichardt’s watchful cinema is one of the indie world’s most exquisite bounties, a space for pioneers (“Meek’s Cutoff,” “First Cow”), artists (“Showing Up”) and wanderers (“Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy”) who command your attention the way an ER waiting room does, lingering tensely.

One might not consider a heist film in such anthropological terms. And yet “The Mastermind,” Reichardt’s latest and one of her best, while set in motion by a daylight art grab orchestrated by Josh O’Connor’s middle-class Massachusetts suburbanite, is another precisely turned Reichardt movie: honest, sad, funny and inherently philosophical about our engagement with the world. As you might expect, it’s really about the crime’s aftermath, our cut from this robbery being a deft, fascinating character study rooted in an apathy that’s starkly juxtaposed with the restive year it’s set in: 1970.

By the look of things, preppy, soft-spoken James Mooney (O’Connor), an unemployed carpenter, isn’t obvious criminal material, no matter what composer Ray Mazurek’s propulsive, horn-forward jazz score might imply. James cases his local art museum, often with his unwitting wife, Teri (Alana Haim), and two young boys in tow. Otherwise, James is just a distracted dad, checked-out husband and disappointing son living off the status and largesse of his parents, an esteemed judge (Bill Camp) and a society mother (Hope Davis).

Still, based solely on the error-prone heist — it’s been ages since pantyhose masks seemed so ridiculous — thievery isn’t this spoiled man’s strong suit either. (You didn’t think that title was respectful, did you?) When he’s stashing the stolen paintings later in a farmhouse’s hayloft and accidentally knocks the ladder out from under him, the moment is amusing and appropriately metaphorical.

Reichardt is laying bare a privileged man’s half-assed delinquency, especially with O’Connor so hypnotic at conveying self-absorbed cluelessness with his woeful eyes, posture and movement. As the movie then hits the road for his escape, the early fall colors of Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography shift to gray tones and darker interiors, and James’ vibe is less rebel eluding capture — even if a pal he visits (John Magaro) expresses admiration — than alienated loser leaving behind a mess, an assessment radiating from Gaby Hoffmann as Magaro’s wife. The bebop groove abandons James, too, slowing into jagged drum solos.

The last contextual indignity are the details of the period itself: Nixon posters, anti-war signs, Vietnam footage on televisions, a protest march. Unforced but ever-present in Reichardt’s mise-en-scène, they remind us that this bored aesthete’s misadventure is an especially empty way to buck conformity. When good trouble beckons, why pick the bad kind?

One can even detect, in this brilliant, captivating Reichardt gem about fortune and fate, a what-if attached to her disaffected male protagonist: Would today’s version of James, just as adrift and arrogant, steal art to assuage his emptiness? Or, thanks to the internet, succeed at something much worse? “The Mastermind” may be an ironic title as heists go. But it also hints at the male-pattern badness still to come.

Any Rams fans whose attention was diverted Sunday at SoFi Stadium by an aerial assault of bird droppings should know whom to blame.

Not the birds. They were just doing what they do (do).

Blame the thief who stole two trained hawks tasked with keeping the skies above the stadium free of other birds, so that the only airborne objects would be tight spirals off the right hand of Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford.

But the hawks — who have names: Alice and Bubba — were stolen at 2:22 p.m. by a suspect the Inglewood Police Department described as a “male Black adult wearing a black jacket with a white stripe going down the shoulder, black pants and black shoes.”

Police said the key was left in the ignition of the Kawasaki Mule UTV that housed the hawks. The thief drove off with the maroon two-seater and hadn’t been caught as of Tuesday morning. The vehicle was last seen in the Village at Century shopping area in Inglewood.

“Affixed to the bed of the UTV were two Harris’s Hawks … housed in green containers,” the police said. “These Hawks are used during the games by a Falconer in order to deter other birds in the area.”

The falconer is Redlands police officer Charles Cogger. The trained birds are Harris’s hawks, also known as the bay-winged hawk, large and lanky raptors that breed from the southwestern United States and throughout South America. They are known for hunting together as a team with vision eight times better than that of humans.

It’s a shame Alice and Bubba weren’t there to see the gorgeous 88-yard touchdown pass from Stafford to Tutu Atwell in the fourth quarter that gave the Rams a 27-20 win over the Indianapolis Colts.

THIS is the astonishing moment a “jewellery thief” is wrestled to the ground and held in a “lion killer” chokehold by tourists.

Brazilian brothers Gabriel and Gustavo Galindo sprung into action after hearing screams from a man claiming he had been robbed.

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Both black belts in Jiu-Jitsu, the siblings quickly put the alleged thief into a “lion killer” chokehold – a popular martial art move that can, in some instances, be deadly.

When police arrived 10 minutes later to escort the man away, applause and cheers erupted for the two brothers.

Shocking footage shows the man pinned to the ground as he attempts to wriggle out of the stranglehold.

According to Brazilian news, the alleged thief tried to bite Gabriel before being warned to “stay still” or leave without an arm.

Gabriel said: “I put him on the ground to show him Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

“By then, there was already a crowd of people enraged with anger towards the unfortunate man.

“Some angry people started to beat him up, but I didn’t have the heart to let them hurt him too badly.”

“We stopped the robbery, taught the thief a lesson, and kept everyone safe.”

Posting the video online, Gabriel quipped: “Enjoying ourselves in Barcelona.”

The clip has massed thousands of views, with hundreds congratulating the holidaygoers for their efforts.

One user hailed the lads “champions” while another crowned them modern day superheroes.

The pair, who were in Barcelona, Spain on a European tour with their family at the time, later said they were left with a “good story to tell”.

Gabriel said: “And we went back to enjoying our day in Barcelona—with a great story to tell.”

Barcelona is notorious for its rampant thieves who target unsuspecting tourists.

Just a couple months ago, extraordinary footage emerged of another tourist tackling a thief to the ground and holding him in a chokehold.

Meanwhile, aast August, Sir Ben Ainslie was robbed at knifepoint for his £17,000 Rolex in the Spanish city.

Ainslie, 47, recalled the horror as a gang mugged him while out for a meal on Saturday night in Barcelona.

The terrifying attack unfolded when he was leaving a restaurant, as reported by local media La Vanguardia.

And last year, unbelievable footage captured a thief swiping a Brit tourist’s phone just as he proposed to his girlfriend in Barcelona.

Footage showed Charlie Bullock surprising his now-fiancée Hannah McNaghten by going down on one knee – but the romantic moment is cut short as a thug is captured nabbing the device.

Charlie propped up his phone on the wall as the two posed for a picture outside Barcelona‘s famous Arc de Triomf, with Hannah totally unaware of what would happen next.

And in 2022, Barcelona FC star Robert Lewandowski chased a thief who stole his £59,000 watch as he signed autographs.

Before an evening training session, the Poland hitman stopped to greet fans outside the club’s Ciutat Esportiva complex.

But one crafty thief used the distraction to open Lewandowski’s car door and make off with the high-end time piece.

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