‘Smash, grab, melt it down’: how material value likely motivated the Louvre heist

The Louvre thieves reached the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and cut through a glass pane with a disc cutter. Photograph: Julien de Rosa/AFP/Getty Images

To break into the world’s most-visited museum in broad daylight, grab eight pieces of priceless Napoleonic jewellery and vanish into the Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and ensuing Hollywood film treatments.

Experts who observe trends in international art crime, however, see Sunday morning’s heist at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the latest in a series of smash-and-grab thefts focused more on the material value of precious stones or metals than the artifacts’ significance, continuing a pattern that has emerged over the last decade in Germany, Britain and the US. The location, they suggest, would have been of secondary concern to the criminals.