Court transcripts reveal the accused were brought onto the job just days beforehand and offered as little as €15,000 for a robbery that netted jewels worth €88 million.
Two men charged in connection with one of the boldest museum robberies in recent memory have told investigators they were only briefed on the scheme a few days before carrying it out — and that one of them didn’t even realise the target was the world’s busiest museum.
Records of June interrogation hearings, reviewed by Le Monde, show suspects Abdoulaye N. and Ghelamallah A. delivering their fullest account so far of the raid that emptied the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon of eight pieces of French crown jewellery on 19 October 2025.
According to the transcripts, the two men told investigating judges an unnamed organiser had recruited them only two or three days before the job, promising them somewhere between €15,000 and €25,000 each.
The organiser reportedly showed them advance video of the gallery and told them to break open the display cases and grab as much jewellery as they could. Abdoulaye N. summed up his instructions plainly: smash the windows and pull the jewellery out of the cases.
“I knew I was going to rob the Louvre,” Abdoulaye N. acknowledged. Ghelamallah A., by contrast, said he was under the impression the target was a Paris workshop where jewellery was made, not the most-visited museum on the planet.
The pair entered the gallery at around 09:30 local time, using a boom lift dressed up to look like maintenance equipment, then bored into the display cases with power tools. Abdoulaye N. described walking into a dark, empty room lit only by the glow inside the cases, with security staff visible somewhere in the distance beyond a doorway.
In roughly eight minutes they fled on motorbikes with a haul valued at about €88 million — tiaras, necklaces, earrings and brooches once belonging to French queens and empresses. The Crown of Empress Eugénie was dropped during the escape and recovered near the museum soon after.
The rest of the jewels, the men say, were passed to the organiser shortly afterwards — who was apparently underwhelmed. According to Abdoulaye N., the organiser felt they should have grabbed more.
Neither suspect has identified the organiser, both citing fear of retaliation. Ghelamallah A. described the people involved as dangerous, saying that although no one had threatened him directly, he’d received calls while in custody warning him to stay silent.
