Paris — The Louvre will stay closed for a second day operating on Monday, administration informed AFP, after thieves stole crown jewels from the museum in Paris a day earlier.
“The museum will not be opening at present,” a museum official informed AFP.
An indication on the museum informed guests the museum remained closed as a result of “distinctive circumstances” and stated all guests with tickets for the day could be reimbursed.
“The museum is closed for the entire day,” a member of employees informed guests.
Shortly earlier than the announcement, queues of impatient guests snaked their method throughout the museum’s pyramid courtyard and below the arches of the primary entrance gallery.
Benoit Tessier/REUTERS
Carol Fuchs, an aged vacationer from the USA, had been standing in line for greater than three-quarters of an hour.
“The audacity, coming by way of a window. I really feel so sorry for whoever was on guard in that room,” she informed AFP after the thieves escaped with prize jewels from the museum’s Apollo Gallery on Sunday.
“Will they ever be discovered? I doubt it. I feel it is lengthy gone,” she stated.
Thieves carried out the brazen daytime heist on Sunday morning. They broke into the enduring landmark utilizing crane-type elevate to power open a window earlier than smashing by way of show instances and making off with jewellery of “inestimable worth,” in accordance with France’s inside minister and the museum stated. They escaped on bikes or scooters, officers stated.
The theft hit The Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, a vaulted corridor that shows a number of the French Crown Jewels beneath a ceiling painted by King Louis XIV’s court docket artist, the ministry stated.
All of it occurred in broad daylight, with vacationers contained in the world’s most visited museum. There have been no accidents reported.
French Tradition Minister Rachida Dati known as the theft the work of “professionals,” describing it on the TF1 TV community as “a four-minute operation carried out with out violence.”
CBS Information correspondent Elizabeth Palmer says many French have reacted with shock on the ease with which such treasured gadgets may very well be so shortly and seemingly simply plucked from such a vaunted, extremely secured establishment.
She requested artwork historian David Chanteranne, who has labored within the Louvre, if the glass within the show instances holding the jewels would have been bolstered by some means?
“Extremely it wasn’t,” he stated, explaining that for the needs of “historic accuracy,” the Louvre had used the unique instances to show the crown jewels, together with glass from Napoleon’s time, two centuries in the past.
