Louvre attendant recalls shock of heist: 'I yelled to get out'

The attendant describes the moment thieves used an angle grinder to burst into the Gallery of Apollo.

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"All of a sudden we heard an huge noise," she told radio station France Inter, in the first account given by an attendant at the scene.

The unnamed attendant and two colleagues initially thought the noise to be an angry visitor, but it was not a normal sound: "It was a dull, slightly metallic noise."

It was, in fact, the moment thieves had used an angle grinder to burst through a reinforced window into the Gallery of Apollo, where the Louvre's collection of historic jewelry is kept.

Within eight minutes, the gang seized treasures, including a necklace that belonged to Napoleon's wife Empress Marie-Louise and a diadem of Napoleon III's wife Empress Eugenie, worth an estimated total of €88m (£77m).