‘I screamed to get out’

A gallery attendant on duty at the Louvre said “no one could have been prepared” for what happened when thieves broke in and stole eight of France’s crown jewels as visitors began arriving on Sunday morning.

“Suddenly we heard a loud noise,” she told France Inter radio station in the first account given by an attendant at the scene.

The unnamed attendant and two colleagues initially thought the sound sounded like an angry visitor, but it was no ordinary sound: “It was a dull, slightly metallic sound.”

In fact, the thieves used an angle grinder to break through a reinforced window into the Gallery of the Apollo, which houses the Louvre’s historic jewelry collection.

Within eight minutes, the gang seized the treasure, including the necklace of Napoleon’s wife Empress Marie-Louise and the diadem of Napoleon III’s wife Empress Eugenie, worth an estimated total of €88m (£77m).

To gain access to the gallery, the thieves used a mechanical ladder on the back of the lorry to take them to the first floor balcony.

Two tourists ran towards them in panic, she said.

“I saw a criminal walking towards me with something that looked like a chainsaw, then I shouted to my colleagues to get out,” she recalls. She shouted a second time that it was a robbery and that they should run.

One of her colleagues raised the alarm on the walkie-talkie and then “we ended up evacuating the meeting without really realizing what was going on”. They closed all the doors as they left to guard the neighboring galleries.

On reflection, the attendant said, “It was unbelievable to us that the display cases would have been broken… We never thought for a moment that there was such a danger… No one could be prepared for that”.

Another Louvre employee came forward to describe the moments after the gang fled.

When the unidentified security guard reached the spot where the gang had parked their lorry outside the Louvre, he said he smelled a strong smell of petrol.

“I ran through the (glass) pyramid and out of the courtyard… I got there at the same moment the criminals fled on a scooter,” he told BFMTV.

The gang had broken the fuel tank of the lorry and had a blowtorch nearby, he said. “It’s clear they intended to set their vehicle on fire. I honestly think we foiled their plan because they never would have left that much evidence.”

“They also lost one of the pieces they wanted to steal, for they lost (the empress) Eugenie’s crown, which they had just stolen, and it fell to the ground.”

The security guard and his colleagues were the first to find the crown, he said: “I can’t say I jumped for joy, especially because the piece was clearly damaged.”

The museum’s director, Laurence des Cars, said the queen’s tiara appeared damaged when the gang cut one of the two display cases with an angle grinder.

She told French senators this week that there were early indications that a “delicate restoration” would be possible for the 19th-century tiara encrusted with diamonds and emeralds.

Although French ministers insisted on security at the museum that day, the Louvre’s director has spoken of years of underfunding and only one external security camera, where the break-in took place.

Her scathing assessment was backed up by the curator, who complained that “for some time we have felt that the culture of safety in the museum is slipping”.