Louvre heist work of petty criminals, not organised crime, prosecutor says

By Geert De Clercq

PARIS (Reuters) -The audacious daytime robbery of historical jewels worth $102 million from the Paris Louvre museum last month was executed by petty criminals, rather than professionals from the world of organised crime, the Paris prosecutor said on Sunday.

On a Sunday morning two weeks ago, two men parked a movers' lift outside the Louvre, rode up to the second storey, smashed a window, cracked open display cases with angle grinders, and then fled on the back of scooters driven by two accomplices in a heist lasting less than seven minutes.

With three of the four suspected thieves now believed to be under arrest and the jewels still missing, their profiles do not resemble Ocean's Eleven-style professional gangsters, but small-time criminals from the hardscrabble northern suburbs of Paris, authorities say.

"This is not quite everyday delinquency... but it is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organised crime," Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau told franceinfo radio.

SUSPECTS 'CLEARLY LOCAL PEOPLE', PROSECUTOR SAYS

She added that the profiles of the four people under arrest so far - including the girlfriend of one of the suspected robbers - are not typical of organised crime professionals capable of executing complex operations.

"These are clearly local people. They all live more or less in Seine-Saint-Denis," she said, referring to a low-income area north of Paris.

French media have speculated that the robbers were amateurs, as they dropped the most precious of the jewels - Empress Eugenie's crown, made of gold, emerald and diamonds - during their flight, left tools and other items at the scene, and failed to set fire to the movers' truck before fleeing.

A week after the raid, police arrested two men suspected of being the ones who broke into the Louvre - a 34-year-old Algerian who has lived in France since 2010 and was detained by police as he tried to board a flight to Algeria, and a 39-year-old already under judicial supervision for aggravated theft.

Both live in Aubervilliers, in northern Paris, and have "partially admitted" their involvement, Beccuau said last week.

Two more suspects, a 37-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, were arrested on October 29 and charged on Saturday.

'AT LEAST' ONE PERSON STILL MISSING FROM HEIST GROUP

Beccuau said the 37-year-old man was believed to be part of the four-man group that carried out the heist, based on DNA found in the moving truck.

She said he had a record of 11 criminal convictions for a range of offences, including traffic-related offences, aggravated theft and an attempt to break into an automated teller machine.

She added that he was in a relationship with the 38-year-old woman and that they have children together, and that he and one of the two other men arrested had been convicted of the same robbery in 2015.

Traces of the woman's DNA were also found in the movers' truck, but Beccuau said these DNA traces seemed to have been transferred into the truck, possibly by a person or an object later put into the vehicle.

The prosecutor's office said on Saturday that both deny involvement in the heist.

Asked whether authorities believed that three of the four thieves were now under arrest, Beccuau said that "at least one person is still missing". She did not rule out there being other accomplices.

Three people who had been arrested along with the couple on October 29 have been freed without charge, the prosecutor's office said on Saturday.

(Reporting by Geert De Clercq; Editing by Jan Harvey)