'Smash, grab, melt it down' Audacious heist motivated by artefacts' material value

To break into the world's most-visited museum in broad daylight, grab eight pieces of priceless Napoleonic jewellery and vanish into the Paris traffic on scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and ensuing Hollywood film treatments.

- Philip Oltermann

Experts who observe trends in international art crime, however, see Sunday morning's heist at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the latest in a series of smashand-grab thefts focused more on the material value of precious stones or metals than the artefacts' significance, continuing a pattern that has emerged over the last decade in Germany, Britain and the US. The location, they suggest, would have been of secondary concern to the criminals.

"You may ask why thieves who want to steal expensive jewellery are breaking into a worldfamous museum rather than a Cartier store," said Christopher A Marinello, an expert in the recovery of stolen works of art.

"The answer is simple: a Cartier store is better protected." A spate of violent jewellery shop thefts caused many outlets to beef up security in recent years, with armed guards and wares no longer kept on display overnight.

Museums look more exposed, being public-facing institutions in historic buildings and given the economic climate.

"Since Covid, governments across the globe have cut back on law enforcement and the culture sector," said Marinello. "If thieves can get into the Louvre, it shows how vulnerable our institutions have become. This is a horrible time to be a museum." The theft of the objects including necklaces made up of eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, the tiara of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a hugely valuable crown once owned by Napoleon III's wife that the thieves dropped by the

roadside on their way out - has inevitably drawn comparisons with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum by the Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia.