No leads in brazen $28 million Paris jewelry heist

PARIS: The cheapest piece they stole was a platinum ring worth €2,000. The most expensive item: a €3.2 million diamond-studded bracelet.

A brazen and meticulously planned robbery of the Harry Winston store in central Paris last weekend netted the unknown thieves about €20 million, or $28.4 million, in gems, one of the largest jewelry thefts ever, French investigators said Thursday, following an inventory of the raided safe.

An elite Interior Ministry unit, the Serious Crime Squad, has been put on the case, but so far investigators lack leads to either the robbers or their booty.

According to the police, four or five masked men entered the Harry Winston boutique at 10 a.m. on Oct. 6 - a shop just around the corner from a local police station and mere footsteps from the tourist hordes of Paris's best-known avenue, the Champs-Élysées.

One by one, the armed robbers overwhelmed the six employees arriving for work, then calmly asked them to open the safe. They vanished with a bag full of heavy necklaces and gems, including a large diamond worth €2 million. None of the employees were hurt.

"It was a standard holdup, like you see in any store in any neighborhood when a bunch of kids steal money from the cashier," said one official close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity. "These guys are professionals. Beginners don't dare go near top-end jewelers," the official said, adding that the real test of the gang's acumen will be whether they can resell the stolen gems on the black market.

Because of the risk of detection, stolen jewels tend to fetch only a fraction of their retail price, sometimes as little as 20 percent, analysts say. French investigators have been circulating information about the stolen merchandise to the police in other countries in the hope of catching the thieves when they approach a prospective buyer.

The Harry Winston robbery dwarfs other recent raids in France and beyond. In Paris, the theft of two diamonds worth an estimated €13 million at an antique fair in Paris in September 2004 came closest. The police never found the perpetrators. In 1994, armed robbers stole the equivalent of about €15 million worth of gems from the jeweler Alexandre Reza in central Paris.

Diamonds are a thief's close friend, to judge by recent years. There were 253 recorded robberies of French jewelers last year, 20 percent more than in 2005, according to an internal report of the French jewelers' federation. Some police officers speak with concern of a "new era" of criminality in the luxury sphere.

Luxury outlets are attracting criminal attention beyond France.

Last month, a gang of moped riders in London robbed the boutique of Luella Bartley, a prominent British designer, and escaped with more than £10,000, or about $20,000, worth of luxury handbags. Asprey, a British jeweler, has been raided several times, losing £400,000 worth of gems on one occasion.

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