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The director of the Louvre museum in Paris has acknowledged a “terrible failure” days after thieves took seven minutes to break in via a window and steal jewels worth €88m, admitting there was “highly insufficient” security camera coverage of the outside walls of the vast building.
Senators questioned Laurence des Cars about the spectacular heist in which four men used a truck with extendable ladder and furniture hoist to access a balcony, cut through a window and steal jewels from the ornate Apollo gallery during opening hours.
“The whole world is shocked and we really don’t need this in France right now”, said Jacques Grosperrin, a senator from the centre-right Les Républicains party, adding that the international media was laughing at France.
Max Brisson, a senator from the same party, said France must not become “the champion of buck passing” on the responsibility for the robbery.
Des Cars, speaking publicly for the first time since the break-in, said: “Despite our efforts, despite our hard work on a daily basis, we failed.”
She said all alarms had functioned during the burglary, but admitted that security cameras did not adequately cover the thieves’ point of entry. “The only camera installed is directed westward and therefore did not cover the balcony involved in the break-in,” she said.
“There are some perimeter cameras, but they are ageing,” she conceded, adding that surveillance of the museum’s outside walls was “highly insufficient”.
Senators asked how a truck with an extendable ladder and furniture hoist could have parked in the wrong direction of traffic on a pavement right up against the wall of museum for two hours, on a busy main road near the Seine River, in what would have required a U-turn and been a parking offence.
Des Cars went over the events of the robbery, describing how the robbers had put out bollards on the pavement as if they were carrying out maintenance work. She said that as soon as they broke a window and entered the museum, the alarm systems went off and the security protocol was followed.
But the thieves exited the museum within minutes. Des Cars said private contractor security guards outside the museum who heard the alerts on their radio system ran around to the van and managed to prevent the robbers setting fire to it before they fled. This helped save valuable evidence.
She said some of the glass cases in the Apollo gallery had been updated in recent years, but with a focus on what was thought to have been the biggest threat: gunshots and bullets. Instead, the men cut through the glass with an angle grinder. But Des Cars said the glass had withstood to a certain point, leaving them having to use their hands to reach through a very small gap to grab the jewels.
She said a diamond and emerald-studded crown dropped by thieves as they fled had been handed back to museum experts who were assessing the damage.
“Initial assessments suggest that a delicate restoration is possible,” she said, adding that
it had had been damaged not by the fall but by the robbers trying to pull it from too small an opening in the display case. “The glass resisted … so objects were crushed as they were being pulled out,” she said.
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Des Cars said she had tendered her resignation on Sunday after the burglary, but the culture minister, Rachida Dati, had refused it.
She defended the museum’s €80m security plan, disputing a recent report that cited “persistent delays”. She said security camera coverage was being increased across the museum’s 37-hectare site in the middle of Paris, whose extensive collections include ancient Egyptian relics and the world’s most famous portrait, the Mona Lisa. She said a police post must now be set up inside the museum.
She also said she had requested a report on existing security measures when she took over the museum in 2021.
She said security plans included “video surveillance covering all facades” and “the installation of fixed thermal cameras”. This would require extensive work on the electricity supply. Another museum official said it would need 40 miles (60km) of cables.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, had earlier ordered the speeding up of security measures at the Louvre.
