Napoleon's jewels were stolen from the Louvre. What is known

The robbers managed to enter the Louvre and stole nine precious jewelry belonging to Empress Josephine, the wife of Napoleon I. No one was injured in the attack. How the robbery occurred and which other museums were robbed — in the material of Izvestia.

What was stolen

• The Louvre was robbed by a group of four people. Two of them directly entered the museum. The attackers used a ladder mounted on a car tower to reach the window. With the help of a grinder, they carefully cut out the glass, then made their way inside and, having completed the theft, fled the scene on scooters.

• Nine items were stolen from the jewelry collection of Napoleon and Empress Josephine, including a brooch, necklace, tiara and other jewelry. At the same time, the legendary Regent diamond, the largest stone in the collection weighing over 140 carats, remained in place and was not stolen.

• The Paris police are involved in a large-scale operation to search for intruders. It is expected that the criminals will be apprehended in the near future.

Other major robberies

In 1911, the Louvre in Paris was stolen, which later turned the Mona Lisa into one of the most famous symbols of world culture. Italian Vincenzo Perugia, who previously worked at the museum, managed to take out a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, hiding it under his work clothes. The loss was noticed only the next day. Later it became known that he acted out of patriotic motives, believing that the work should be in Italy. Two years later, the painting was discovered in Florence, and the story of the robbery changed the perception of the Gioconda forever.

In 1994, two robbers stole Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" from the Oslo National Gallery in a matter of seconds. They used a ladder, removed the canvas from the frame and disappeared in just a minute. There was a note left at the crime scene with a mocking thanks for the weak security. Three months later, the masterpiece was returned, but this case was only the first theft of the "Scream".

Ten years later, in 2004, armed masked criminals broke into the Munch Museum during the day, in front of visitors. They tore down the "Scream" and "Madonna" from the walls and left by car. The search lasted two years, and only in 2006 the paintings were returned. After this incident, security systems in Norwegian museums were radically revised.

• In 2012, a high-profile cyber robbery of the Kunsthalle Museum took place in Rotterdam. The criminals, who operated at night, managed to bypass the alarm system, presumably by hacking into electronic databases and studying the security schedule in advance. As a result, seven paintings were stolen, including works by Monet, Gauguin and Freud. So far, the stolen works have not been found, and there is a version that they were used in the criminal environment as a kind of "currency".

• In 2019, Germany faced one of the most audacious robberies of the century — ten unique jewelry sets of the XVIII century were stolen from the Dresden "Green Arches". To get inside, the attackers set fire to the electrical panel and thereby de-energized the historic city center. After that, they broke down the window bars and took away jewelry worth over a billion euros. Some of the stolen items were returned only three years later, after the investigation concluded a deal with the defendants.

• In 2021, another daring incident occurred at the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum: a man smashed a glass display case with a hammer in the presence of visitors and took away a 19th-century gold snuffbox. The stolen exhibit was found a few days later, and the perpetrator himself subsequently received a six-year prison sentence.