Lapses gave Louvre thieves crucial 30-second advantage against police, inquiry finds

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By Louise Rasmussen

PARIS, Dec 10 (Reuters) – The burglars who robbed Paris’s Louvre museum benefited from 30 seconds of security lapses that helped ensure their getaway with France’s still-missing crown jewels, an inquiry from France’s culture ministry into the spectacular heist showed on Wednesday.

Four burglars made off with jewels worth $102 million on October 19, exposing glaring security gaps at the world’s most visited museum and revealing its deteriorating state.

A combination of factors, including delayed footage from security cameras as well as an easily breakable glass window at the Apollo gallery, where the French crown jewels were taken, delayed the police response by roughly 30 seconds.

“For those precious 30 seconds, all it would have taken was a slightly faster alert from the control room agents if they had been able to see the camera sooner, and a longer window break-in resistance time than was observed,” Noel Corbin, chief of general inspection of cultural affairs, said.

“With a margin of just 30 seconds, the Securitas guards or the police officers in the patrol car could have prevented the thieves’ escape.”

Roughly 2,200 staff work at the Louvre, which houses around 500,000 artworks, of which 38,000 are exhibited. Nearly 9 million people visited the museum in 2023, corresponding to roughly 30,000 visitors per day.

“It’s a sort of town. And not a small town,” Corbin said. “The coordination of interventions and the multiplicity of actors is extremely important.”

He said camera images were transmitted to a central control room and a zone control room, but the images were not viewed live, due to a lack of exterior cameras as well as a lack of screens to watch all cameras simultaneously. 

(Reporting by Louise Breusch Rasmussen, editing by Gabriel Stargardter, Aidan Lewis)