An alleged member of the four-person team that broke into the Louvre last October, stealing crown jewels worth roughly $100 million, has been denied release, Le Figaro reports. The suspect, Rachid H., 40, has been detained since November 2025, and will remain in pre-trial detention, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday.
On the morning of Sunday, October 19, 2025, the gang used a truck-mounted motorized ladder to break into the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery through a second-floor window. Once inside, they smashed two display cases and grabbed eight pieces of jewelry. (A crown once owned by Empress Eugénie was dropped in their haste.) As alarms sounded, they fled and escaped on two motorized scooters. The entire heist unfolded in roughly seven minutes.
The stolen jewels have yet to be recovered, but police have made relatively more in identifying the thieves. The first two suspects were arrested within a month of the heist: Abdoulaye N., 40, an unlicensed taxi driver with prior robbery convictions who is known online for his motocross stunts, and Ghelamallah A., 36, an unemployed Algerian national. Both have admitted involvement, though their testimony has raised more questions than it has answered.
In June, the two told investigators that a sponsor, whom they declined to name, had recruited them for the heist. They claimed to have been brought on just days before October 19, and the principal accomplice who gave them the orders, they said, remains at large, while the men arrested after them—including Rachid H.—had nothing to do with the crime. The purported mastermind, they claimed, had entered the Louvre with the robbers and remains at large.
Rachid H. was detained on suspicion of having provided the robbers with the keys to the parking facility in Aubervilliers. In January, AFP reported that he admitted to having “passed” the keys to “two people” but maintained that he knew nothing about the robbery. His defense has pointed out that his client’s fingerprints were found neither on the truck used in the heist nor in the parking lot where the robbers allegedly handed the jewels to an unidentified individual.