00:01Remember the 2003 Da Vinci Code? Well, that seems to have become a reality in 2025.
00:07The Louvre Museum in Paris is still closed while police investigate a brazen heist which targeted France's priceless crown jewels.
00:17Now thieves wielding power tools broke into the world's most visited museum and in broad daylight, that is,
00:25before escaping on scooters with eight extremely valuable items of jewellery.
00:31A manhunt is currently underway in France for the four people who staged an audacious daylight robbery at the Louvre Museum.
00:38But what are the thieves likely to do with the stolen jewellery? That remains to be a question. Here's a report, take a look.
00:46It's the heist of the century, according to French newspapers on Monday,
00:50after four thieves stole priceless jewellery in broad daylight at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
00:55Right now, it's a race between the police and their investigators.
00:59So what are the thieves likely to do with the stolen jewellery?
01:02Christophe Marinello is the founder of Art Recovery International.
01:05There's no way they can just submit these things to Suggies or Christie's, and they need to break them up.
01:12And what they're going to do to hide them is open up the jewels and take out the diamonds and the sapphires
01:19and the emeralds and take them over to a place where they can have them recut in Antwerp or in Tel Aviv
01:26and find a jeweler that won't ask any questions.
01:29And once they're been cut into smaller jewels, the deed is done. It's over.
01:36Well, we'll never see these pieces again intact.
01:39The robbery, which took between six and seven minutes, has prompted France to re-evaluate the security of its cultural sites.
01:46The thieves used a crane to break into the Louvre, stealing priceless objects from an area that houses the French crown jewels before fleeing on motorbikes.
01:56Oh, it was a very well-planned theft, absolutely.
01:59I mean, the only clue that they left was, that should have raised a red flag,
02:04was that the workers were working on the museum on a Sunday in Paris.
02:09Nobody works on Sunday in Paris at 9 a.m.
02:12France's Justice Minister, Gérard Darmanin, criticized the ease with which the robbers executed the heist,
02:19calling it a national embarrassment.
02:21Despite confidence that the robbers will be caught, the incident has drawn criticism.
02:26And smaller museums around the world fear copycats.
02:29Here is Dutch art crime investigator Arthur Braun.
02:33If the Louvre can be robbed, how can we protect ourselves, you know?
02:38And they are afraid that local thieves will think, well, you know, they took it off with the Louvre, let's try our local museum.
02:46So that's the biggest fear now in the museum world.
02:50Meanwhile, the museum, which had been expected to reopen on Monday, remained closed.
02:56Clever, to use a cherry picker and a glass cutter to steal priceless, well, sentimentally priceless jewels from the Louvre.
03:06The fact that it was done in daylight is also astounding.
03:10But if you look like you belong, you belong.
03:13So I guess they used that rule.
03:15So I guess they used that rule.
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