A year after a shocking robbery at the Louvre Museum, the four main suspects are in prison awaiting trial, but police appear to have run out of leads to locate the stolen crown jewels. Thieves disguised as workers entered the museum with industrial disc cutters on October 19 last year before making off with eight irreplaceable items worth an estimated $100 million. They include a brooch and crown of Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III. President Emmanuel Macron called the theft an attack on French history. Experts from law enforcement and private art theft agencies who spoke to AFP believe the best chance of recovering the treasures is if the thieves acted alone and hid their loot somewhere in the Paris region. “There was a brief period of time where they may have been hidden in a wall or buried,” Christopher Marinello of Art Recovery International, a private agency, told AFP. The four men were arrested within 10 days of the robbery. Read moreLouvre boss warns of risk of closure unless museum is ‘repaired, updated and transformed’ Interrogation The last known sighting of the glittering 19th-century gems was on CCTV footage recorded in an underground dungeon in the gritty northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers, where all the suspects live. Extensive searches led by a 100-person investigation team have been carried out in their and their families’ homes, basements, garages and attics, all without success. If the jewels have been hidden or handed over to a “fence” for safekeeping, there is still a possibility that one of the suspects will confess in exchange for a more lenient sentence, said renowned Dutch private art detective Arthur Brand. “The French police are very professional, they know how to interrogate, they know how to put pressure on someone,” he told AFP. “You just need to talk, and in many cases, you talk.” Read moreLouvre robbery: “We have recovered millions of works of art thanks to informants,” explains the legal expert Dismantling The most worrying scenario is that the gang acted following orders from a ringleader or intermediary with links to organized crime, to whom they delivered the jewelry once they finished their robbery. “The power of organized crime is not only to provide experience to commit a crime, but also to have people who take the objects and sell them,” said Corrado Catesi, head of the stolen art unit of Interpol, an international police agency. While detained, two of the suspects claimed that a ringleader was part of their team, which is being treated with skepticism by investigators, a source close to the case recently told AFP. In the worst cases, the jewels were transported outside of France or to a local contact in the underground gemstone business. “It’s mainly diamonds, so they have to dismantle them, trim them and sell them. If they went to one place, it would be Antwerp,” Brand said, referring to the Belgian diamond hub. Marinello lists Tel Aviv and India as other possible destinations. Tobias Kormind, CEO of 77 Diamonds, Europe’s largest online diamond jeweler, told AFP that “once cut, re-entering the legitimate supply chain to be purchased by wholesalers or retailers is quite simple.” “Unless a stone possesses ultra-distinctive internal inclusions, even major diamond laboratories like the GIA would have difficulty marking a freshly polished diamond as stolen property,” he said. Read moreThe Louvre heist: Security lapses and deeper cracks in France’s main museum ‘There is still a chance’ But if the jewels fell into the hands of an organized crime group, it seems there is still some reason for hope. Brand referred to several cases in which stolen jewelry was recovered, particularly after a raid at the TEFAF art fair in the Netherlands in 2022 or the theft at the Gruenes Gewoelbe museum in Dresden, Germany, in 2019. “Although we all think that most of the gold, silver and diamonds that are stolen we never see again, in some cases we do,” he explained. “There is still a possibility that we will see the Louvre jewels again and it is possible that someone will speak before the court process.” The jewels are still listed as missing in Interpol’s database of stolen works of art. Analysis of research around the world reveals that objects “can take from three months to 40 years to recover,” Catesi told AFP. (FRANCE 24 with AFP)