Priceless treasures of Louvre looted in seven minutes with a ladder, cutters and scooters

PRICELESS jewels stolen in a daylight raid on Paris's Louvre Museum are likely to be lost for ever, an expert warned last night.

- Richard Ashmore and Peter Allen

It took the masked thieves just seven minutes to grab nine pieces of jewellery that once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte and his family. One item - Empress Eugenie's crown was recovered soon after wards after apparently being dropped and damaged.

Chris A Marinello, founder of Art Recovery International, told the Daily Express it was now a race against time for the police because it was likely the "pieces would be broken up and lost for ever".

He said: "The criminals are going to try and hide the crime as quickly as possible, and how do they do that? They break up the jewellery, they melt any precious metals.

"If there are any diamonds or stones of value, they will have them re-cut.They are not interested in keeping these items intact and preserving our cultural heritage."

Mr Marinello said the mindset of thieves targeting museums had changed in recent years, and crooks were increasingly not concerned about the condition of the precious items they were stealing.

He added: "They don't care about cultural heritage, it's all about money with them.

"Now these gangs that are operating throughout Europe are so hungry for cash that they just throw the cultural importance of the piece out of the window.

"It's all about the raw material. They are ignorant, they just don't care about the history of Napoleon or anything about these pieces they are just stones and precious metals to them.

"It's heartbreaking. How do you hide a diamond? You break it up into smaller diamonds.

"It's still valuable, you can still get money for it, but no one is going to know it came from this particular theft. These diamonds are not marked."