Armed gang steals US$9.5m of jewels at French toll booth
Print Edition
A group of “battle-hardened” armed thieves attacked two heavily guarded vans carrying jewels at a French motorway toll station in the dead of night, making off with a haul worth about 9 million euros (US$9.5 million), police said yesterday.
Security forces are working to find those behind the heist, which took place about midnight on a motorway in the Yonne district, 200 kilometers southeast of Paris, searching within a large perimeter around the area and under the watch of air support.
A police source said there were about 15 robbers, all “heavily armed and battle-hardened.”
No one was hurt in the holdup and the Avallon toll booth itself was not damaged, prosecutors and the firm managing the motorway said, suggesting the raid was done by professionals.
“They are probably men who stem from organized crime and who are well informed. There were no shots fired and everything happened at lightning speed,” a police source said.
The large vans, which were transporting jewels for a planned sale in the eastern city of Besancon, were found burnt and abandoned not far from the toll station. One of them was completely ripped apart.
Other vehicles that could have belonged to the robbers were found in the nearby village of Quenne.
Attacks on armored vehicles carrying jewels or cash often require special equipment such as explosives or assault rifles, and while they occurred regularly at the beginning of the 2000s in France, they have dwindled in recent years.
The last major such heist was in 2009 when armored van driver Toni Musulin escaped with his vehicle after two of his colleagues stepped away, making off with at least 11.5 million euros in cash collected from a Bank of France building.
Musulin became an overnight Internet sensation at a time when the super-rich were being blamed for the financial crisis.
Investigators soon found packets of cash totalling 9.1 million euros in a lockup garage in Lyon, near where the abandoned van was found, and after 10 days on the run, Musulin gave himself in.
The rest of the cash was never found.
When it comes to jewelry, the country’s most spectacular heist was a double robbery at a Harry Winston shop in Paris in 2007 and 2008.
In the first holdup in October 2007, four masked gunmen wearing decorators’ overalls robbed employees at the store.
The thieves had spent the night in the shop with the help of a security guard. They made off with watches and jewelry worth about 32 million euros.
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