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Jill Winnacker

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In Just 7 Brazen Minutes, Thieves Grab ‘Priceless’ Jewels From Louvre

The robbers employed a portable electric ladder to break into a second-floor wing of the Paris museum that holds the French crown jewels.

There they smashed two cases, sounding more alarms, and snatched eight precious objects, including a royal sapphire necklace, a royal emerald necklace and its matching earrings, and a diadem worn by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, France’s 19th-century ruler.

The burglars went back down the ladder to a road shouldering the Seine and made their getaway with two waiting members of their team on motor scooters.

It was the most brazen — and possibly the most costly — theft ever staged at the Louvre, which houses the country’s most prized art collections. French politicians publicly mourned the loss and railed against those they deemed responsible, loudly demanding to know how such a thing could happen at the world’s most famous museum at 9:30 on a Sunday morning.