Louvre robbery leaves Paris’ iconic museum shuttered for a second day

Paris — The Louvre will remain closed for a second day running on Monday, management told AFP, after thieves stole crown jewels from the museum in Paris a day earlier.

“The museum is not opening today,” a museum official told AFP.

A sign at the museum told visitors the museum remained closed due to “exceptional circumstances” and said all visitors with tickets for the day would be reimbursed.

“The museum is closed for the whole day,” a member of staff told visitors.

Shortly before the announcement, queues of impatient visitors snaked their way across the museum’s pyramid courtyard and under the arches of the main entrance gallery.

Carol Fuchs, an elderly tourist from the United States, had been standing in line for more than three-quarters of an hour.

“The audacity, coming through a window. I feel so sorry for whoever was on guard in that room,” she told AFP after the thieves escaped with prize jewels from the museum’s Apollo Gallery on Sunday.

“Will they ever be found? I doubt it. I think it’s long gone,” she said.

Thieves carried out the brazen daytime heist on Sunday morning. They broke into the iconic landmark using crane-type lift to force open a window before smashing through display cases and making off with jewelry of “inestimable value,” according to France’s interior minister and the museum said. They escaped on motorcycles or scooters, officials said.

The robbery hit The Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, a vaulted hall that displays some of the French Crown Jewels underneath a ceiling painted by King Louis XIV’s court artist, the ministry said.

It all happened in broad daylight, with tourists inside the world’s most visited museum. There were no injuries reported.

French Culture Minister Rachida Dati called the robbery the work of “professionals,” describing it on the TF1 TV network as “a four-minute operation carried out without violence.”

CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer says many French have reacted with shock at the ease with which such treasured items could be so quickly and seemingly easily plucked from such a vaunted, highly secured institution.

She asked art historian David Chanteranne, who has worked in the Louvre, if the glass in the display cases holding the jewels would have been reinforced somehow?

“Incredibly it wasn’t,” he said, explaining that for the purposes of “historical accuracy,” the Louvre had used the original cases to display the crown jewels, including glass from Napoleon’s time, two centuries ago.