France’s Louvre Museum and its culture minister, Rachida Daati, both hit back at criticism of security arrangements at the world’s most famous museum, two days after thieves stole eight “priceless” pieces of jewelery in an early morning raid.
“Have the Louvre’s security precautions failed? No, they have not failed. That’s a fact. The security measures worked,” Dati said during a question-and-answer session in parliament on Tuesday.
However, Dati’s comments do not completely dismiss the doubts that were raised about the alarm systems, as their complete failure was not in question.
Punctual alarm? advanced display case
The Paris prosecution service had said earlier Tuesday that “an investigation into the functionality of the alarm system continues.”
The issue was not whether the alarms sounded at all, but whether they sounded immediately when the thieves entered, or just a minute before they escaped. The police’s slow warning could have proved detrimental to efforts to reach the museum in time.
Meanwhile, the museum defended the condition of the display cases that thieves took from the Apollo Gallery on Sunday.
“The Louvre Museum claims that the display cases installed in December 2019 represent considerable progress in terms of security, given the degree of obsolescence of the older equipment, due to which, without replacement, the works would have been removed from public view,” the museum said in a statement on Tuesday.
In the theft, the thieves parked a truck outside and used an extendable movers’ ladder to access the Apollo Gallery shortly before the opening. They climbed up, cut the jewelery from the display cases and fled within minutes.
They destroyed eight pieces considered priceless, including an emerald and diamond necklace that Napoleon I had given to his wife, Empress Marie-Louise, and a tiara set with approximately 2,000 diamonds that once belonged to Empress Eugenie.
The Louvre is closed amid fears that the jewels have already been melted.
The museum remained closed Tuesday after the robbery, as experts warned that the chances of recovering the stolen jewels were slim and that their condition was deteriorating over time.
Tim Carpenter, head of the art conservation organization Argus Cultural Property Consultancy and longtime head of the FBI’s art crimes division, warned that it is far easier to melt down jewels and sell them as precious metals than to make money from a stolen famous painting or artwork.
The robbery has brought a sudden and heightened security response to French cultural sites amid allegations of budget shortfalls and cutbacks in recent years.
Also on Tuesday, in separate but related news, charges were filed against a Chinese-born woman accused of stealing gold nuggets worth more than $1.5 million from the Paris Museum of Natural History last month. The 24-year-old man was arrested while trying to dispose of nearly 1 kilogram of melted gold pieces in Barcelona.
Two other institutions were affected in September, and in January this year, Louvre president Laurence des Cars warned Culture Minister Daichi about “worrying levels of obsolescence” in the museum’s security capabilities, including the partial absence of infrastructure such as video surveillance.
The specialist Paris police unit known as the BRB, which has more than a dozen agents specializing in museum theft among its ranks of about 100 investigators, has taken over the Louvre case.
Edited by: Jennifer Cimino Gonzalez