Thieves wielding power tools raided the Louvre in broad daylight Sunday, taking just seven minutes to grab some of France’s priceless crown jewels, but dropping a gem-encrusted crown as they fled, officials and sources said.

Authorities recovered the 19th-century crown — damaged — near the museum.

The spectacular heist, one of several to target French museums in recent months, forced the closure of the Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum and home to the Mona Lisa.

President Emmanuel Macron posted on social media that “everything is being done” to catch the perpetrators and recover the stolen items.

Police are looking for a team of four thieves, Paris’s chief prosecutor Laure Beccuau told the BFMTV channel.

Soldiers patrolled the famed glass pyramid entrance, while evacuated visitors, tourists and passersby were kept at a distance behind police tape.

It was “like a Hollywood movie”, one American tourist, Talia Ocampo, told AFP.

It was “crazy” and “something we won’t forget — we could not go to the Louvre because there was a robbery”, she said.

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A culture ministry statement said eight items of jewellery had been stolen from the Gallerie Apollon that houses the French crown jewels.

“Two high-security display cases were targeted, and eight objects of invaluable cultural heritage were stolen,” said the ministry statement.

They included the emerald-and-diamond necklace that Napoleon gave his wife Empress Marie Louise, and the crown of Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III.

Beccuau said the thieves had threatened museum guards with the angle grinders they used to break into the jewellery cases.

A team of 60 investigators was working on the case, she added.

– ‘Unsellable’ –

The robbers used a powered, extendable ladder of the sort used to hoist furniture into buildings to get into a gilded gallery housing the crown jewels, said officials.

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Eugenie’s crown was recovered after the thieves dropped it as they made their escape, said the culture ministry statement.

The crown, featuring golden eagles, is covered in 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds, according to the museum’s website.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the thieves had used the furniture hoist to steal “priceless” items from two displays in the museum’s “Galerie d’Apollon” (“Apollo’s Gallery”).

The items stolen also included a necklace from the sapphire jewellery of Queen Marie Amelie and Queen Hortense and a pair of emerald earrings that once belonged to Marie Louise, said the culture ministry.

The thieves arrived between 9:30 and 9:40 am (0730 and 0740 GMT), the source following the case said, shortly after the museum opened to the public at 9:00 am.

One police source said the robbers had ridden up on a scooter armed with angle grinders and used the furniture hoist to get inside the Louvre.

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A witness named Samir, who was riding a bicycle nearby at the time, told the TF1 channel that he saw two men “get on the hoist, break the window and enter… it took 30 seconds”.

He said he saw four of them leave on scooters, and he called the police.

The robbery happened just 800 metres (half a mile) from Paris police headquarters.

The Louvre’s management told AFP it had closed because it wanted to “preserve traces and clues for the investigation”.

The director of the Drouot auction house told the LCI broadcaster he feared the jewels would be broken down into gems and precious metal to be sold, as they would be “completely unsellable in their current state”.

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– ‘Great vulnerability’ –

The Louvre used to be the seat of French kings until Louis XIV abandoned it for Versailles in the late 1600s.

It is the world’s most visited museum, last year welcoming nine million people to its extensive hallways and galleries.

Nunez, the capital’s former police chief who became interior minister last week, said he was aware of “a great vulnerability” in museum security in France.

Last month, criminals used an angle grinder to break into Paris’s Natural History Museum, making off with gold samples worth 600,000 euros ($700,000).

Thieves earlier in the month stole two dishes and a vase from a museum in the central city of Limoges, the losses estimated at 6.5 million euros.

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Last year, four thieves stole snuffboxes and other artifacts from another Paris museum, breaking into a display case with axes and baseball bats.

But thefts from the Louvre have been rarer.

A painting by French painter Camille Corot disappeared from the museum in 1998 and has never been recovered.

In 1911, an Italian worker at the museum stole the Mona Lisa, but it was recovered and today sits behind security glass.

Macron in January pledged the Louvre would be redesigned after its director voiced alarm about dire conditions inside. On Sunday, he said that that project included reinforced security.

Dati said Sunday that new security measures would be part of the renovation plan.

AFP