France Hit by Another Art Heist as Thieves Steal Renoir Paintings Worth €9 Million
€9 Million Renoir Paintings Stolen in France Art Heist
Yet another heist in France from the Louvre jewels to the Renoir paintings. Four paintings worth 9 million euros have been stolen from a Museum in the south of France in a coastal town about an hour and a half outside of Nice. The entire heist was possible because of an electric motor saw.
This heist follows last year’s largest heist last year at the Louvre although the criminals were caught. The prized jewels worth 88 million euros were never recovered.
The heist at the Renoir took place in the early morning of Tuesday 8 September around 5am. Apparently, the only hurdle stopping the thieves was a fence and they just cut their way through it. After that, it was simply a stroll across the garden and through a broken window making their way in. The thieves were indeed very well equipped and well informed because Tuesdays is the only day the museum is closed to the public and there was a crew change on that day.
The paintings were not just hung on the walls with a thin rope and nail but bolted and welded to the walls the criminals had to specially cut through the bolts and that was when the alarms rang. At that point, the police were alerted. The thieves knowing that the police would soon arrive, made a run for it. They left the Renoir with 4 paintings but were able to successfully abscond with two of them. Dropping two of the paintings in the museum gardens Madame Pichon and Coco Reading, the police arrived within five minutes when the alarm was triggered but no immediate arrest was made.
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Robert Wittman the Former FBI National Art Crime Team says in an interview with News Nation,
“These guys are not good art thieves, I think they probably would be amateurs to a certain level they may have had some inside information as to when the guards would be changed so they could bring the saw in, to cut through the gate, if the fence security was so good the alarm would have gone off at the gate but in this situation it didn’t. I think that these guys will be caught pretty quickly because they left a lot of forensic evidence behind. The police will have an idea of who those guys are very quickly.”
The interviewer, Elizabeth Vargas asked what the thieves would do with the paintings, unlike the precious jewels from the Louvre that were cut up and sold on the market in pieces, how would they go about selling a painting? He explained that “they probably saw paintings being auctioned off and thought of going to a museum to steal some and not being able to sell them.”
Online speculation suggests that a wealthy person was behind the heist to hang the paintings in a secret room since the stolen paintings cannot be displayed to the public. However, the police are actively working towards the arrest of the criminals and a possible recovery of the two paintings. France has really had it with the back-to-back art thieves, and every museum needs to solidify its security.
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