Gang loots €4.5m of jewellery from French museum in 11-minute heist
Three masked men have looted €4.5m worth of jewellery from the museum of the French jeweller and glassmaker Lalique, located in the Alsace region.
The gang broke into the museum at around 5:30am on July 5th and swiftly made their way to the exhibition hall.
Once there, they smashed six showcases with hammers and sledgehammers; from the detritus, they retrieved 27 crystal pieces.
The heist, which was filmed on the museum’s internal CCTV, took all of 11 minutes to pull off.
The break-in was discovered an hour later by the cleaner. Christian Dorschner, who doubles as the vice-chairman of the museum and the mayor of Wingen-sur-Moder, where the museum is located, has shared his “outrage” at the situation.
He told the local newspaper Les dernières nouvelles d’Alsace that “alarms went off”, but the “security company failed to intervene at once and did not alert the gendarmes”.
As a result of the robbery, the museum has shared on its website that it will be closed “for several days”.
The museum has since disclosed that one of the key stolen items was the “Femme-libellule ailes ouvertes,” or “Woman Dragonfly With Open Wings,” pendant designed and crafted by René Lalique between 1898 and 1900.
The gang of thieves also made off with various brooches, necklaces, and pendants; two bracelets; a choker; a long necklace; a bust; a perfume bottle; a comb; a hatpin; a belt buckle; and a face-à-main, as per the National Jeweler.
The museum added solemnly that “once the jewellery has been dismantled, the value of the materials pales in comparison to its artistic value.”
The news of this latest burglary comes just eight months after the Louvre heist, which led to the theft of the Crown Jewels and shocked the world as a four-person gang executed a €88 million heist in under eight minutes.
Though several subsequent arrests were made, the jewellery stolen from the iconic French museum is still missing.
Subsequently, a parliamentary report exposed that across 2,000 French museums, there exists an overwhelmingly serious issue with security.
