The Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, announced this Wednesday that the two arrested for participating in the robbery at the Louvre Museum on October 19 have “partially” acknowledged their participation in the events. Both people—whose DNA samples have been found at the crime scene—were arrested last Sunday when they were about to leave the country for Mali and Algeria. Beccuau has not provided more information about the confession of the suspects “so as not to interfere in the investigation”, and has asked the investigating judge to charge the two men with crimes of robbery, with a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, and association of criminals, which would add another 10, in addition to requesting preventive detention.
The two men had criminal records, one for traffic offenses and the other for aggravated robbery. The first is a 34-year-old Algerian who has lived in France since 2010, and who was trying to return to his country when he was detained at Charles de Gaulle airport around eight o’clock on Sunday night. His DNA was found on one of the motorcycles the group used to escape after the robbery.
The other man, 39, was arrested the same day from his home in Aubervilliers, in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, north of Paris. His DNA was also in one of the two display cases from which the jewelry was stolen and in some of the objects that they abandoned to flee, the prosecutor confirmed.
The stolen jewels have not yet appeared: “I maintain the hope that we will find them and return them to the Louvre and to the nation. These jewels are unsaleable, whoever bought them would be considered guilty of complicity with the crime,” warned the prosecutor. The problem is that the theft was probably commissioned and designed to dismantle the jewelry and sell the diamonds separately. Something that would make it practically impossible to locate.
The investigations are now based on the numerous clues left by the thieves in their hasty escape: vests, motorcycle helmets… Hair belonging to one of the thieves – probably the first to enter the museum – was found inside the helmet. The suspects also failed to set fire to the platform and truck used to access the Apollo Gallery, both found abandoned in the middle of a public road. According to initial investigations, the thieves would have stolen the elevator after making an appointment on the second-hand object buying and selling website Le Bon Coin with a seller who wanted to get rid of it. The events occurred in the city of Louvres (Val-d’Oise), a few days before the assault.