Gold worth $1.18m stolen in Paris museum heist

The Galerie de Mineralogie of the Museum of Natural History is closed after someone stole several gold nuggets from the Paris Natural History Museum. Photo / Getty Images

Thieves have broken into Paris’ Natural History Museum, making off with gold samples worth €600,000 in the latest of a series of robberies from cultural institutions, according to the museum.

A break-in was detected on Tuesday morning (local time), after intruders reportedly used an angle grinder and a blow torch to force their way into the riverside complex that is popular with Parisians and tourists.

“The theft concerns several specimens of native gold from the national collections held by the museum,” the museum’s press office told AFP late on Tuesday.

“While the stolen specimens are valued at around €600,000 [$1.18m] based on the price of raw gold, they nevertheless carry an immeasurable heritage value,” it added.

Native gold is a metal alloy containing gold and silver in their natural, unrefined form.

An unnamed police source told the Parisien newspaper that the museum’s alarm and surveillance systems had been disabled by a cyber attack in July, but it was unclear if they were working when the theft took place.

“We are dealing with an extremely professional team, perfectly aware of where they needed to go, and with professional equipment,” museum director Emmanuel Skoulios told the BFM TV channel.

“It is absolutely not by chance that they went for these specific items,” he added.

Famed for its dinosaur skeletons and taxidermy, the National Natural History Museum in the chic 5th district of the French capital also houses a geology and mineralogy gallery.

‘Critical time’

The museum closed its mineralogy gallery on Tuesday and was checking its collection for other losses.

One of its treasures is a native gold and quartz sample measuring 9 by 8.5cm that originated in the Donatia mine in California and was gifted to the museum by a wealthy French collector, according to its website.

The robbery “comes at a critical time for cultural institutions and museums in particular. Several public collections have indeed been targeted by thefts in recent months”, the museum added.

It did not elaborate on the other robberies, but the Adrien Dubouche National Museum in Limoges in central France is known to have had a break-in this month.

Thieves stole two dishes and a vase in Chinese porcelain classed as national treasures, with the losses estimated at €6.5m.

Last November, four men with axes and baseball bats smashed the display cases in broad daylight at the Cognacq-Jay museum in Paris, making off with several 18th-century works.

The next day, jewellery valued at several million euros was stolen during an armed robbery at a museum in Saone-et-Loire in central France.

The most notorious museum heist of recent times happened at the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris in May 2010.

Vjeran Tomic, a Croatian burglar nicknamed Spiderman, made off with masterpieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani valued at more than €100m.

The case revealed extraordinary security lapses at the museum, including that motion-detection alarms had been out of order for two months and three guards failed to spot him.

Tomic was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2017.

- Agence France-Presse