A pale autumn sun, tourists milling through the museum halls, and excited chatter among enthusiasts—it was a usual October Sunday at the Louvre in Paris. Until it wasn’t.

At 9.30am, barely half an hour after the day’s first tickets had been scanned, a small, highly organised group of intruders made its move, pulling off a swift, bold and irrevocably damaging robbery that would stun the world.

According to the Washington Post, the robbers arrived in broad daylight, entering the heavily guarded museum via a window of the ornate Galerie d’Apollon—the vaulted hall within the Louvre where France’s historic crown jewels are displayed.

Working with clockwork precision, they used a basket lift mounted on a truck, which France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez described as the access device to r

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