This is The Guardian.

Today, the jewellery heist of the decade.

So this was a sunny Sunday morning outside the most visited museum in the world.

It was 9.30 a.m. People had already started visiting the museum. Cues were forming outside. People were milling around inside.

At her flat not too far away, Auxelie Chrysiface, the Guardian's Paris correspondent, was finally hoping for some downtime after a tumultuous few weeks

in French politics. But it wasn't to be.

At 9.30am, four men arrived in a truck outside the Louvre Museum on one of the streets which borders the River Sen.

And they drove this truck right up to the edge of the

wall of the museum beneath a very beautiful balcony. First of all, they carefully put out traffic

cones to look like they were doing building work or delivery. They had an extendable ladder.

So they pushed up that ladder. They had a furniture hoist. And then two of the men, one was wearing an orange high-vis

jacket like a builder and one was wearing a yellow high-vis jacket. They got into the furniture

hoist, casually went up to the balcony, climbed over it and there they're faced by a reinforced

glass window into one of the Louvre's most beautiful galleries.

The men cut through the window with some power tools and slipped inside the museum.

This was the Apollo Gallery. It's the most ornate and arguably the most beautiful room in the Louvre Museum.

It was decorated at the request of Louis Catoz, the Sun King, in honour of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun. It has a beautiful gold vaulted ceiling and it houses the French crown jewels. The men took no time to admire the splendour. They simply took

out an angle grinder, cut through the glass, a very neat square, climbed in, went up to two cases with priceless jewels, broke into

those cases, at which point the alarms went off, but they still had time to snatch jewels,

go back to the window, back down the ladder, and disappear on high-powered motorbikes.

They left in such a hurry that they actually dropped one of the most important pieces,

which was an imperial crown of Empress Eugenie, which contained more than 1,300 diamonds.

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