Louvre director resigns 4 months after stunning jewellery heist on the museum

[ad_1] The pinnacle of the Louvre Museum resigned Tuesday, 4 months after a brazen daylight heist the place thieves snatched jewels price roughly $102 million, stunning French residents who questioned how a safety breach of such magnitude might have taken place.

French President Emmanuel Macron accepted Laurence des Automobiles' resignation, his workplace said in a statement .

The assertion famous the resignation as “an act of duty at a time when the world’s largest museum wants each stability and a powerful new impetus to efficiently full main safety and modernization initiatives.”

The group of 4 robbers was capable of bypass safety techniques and used energy instruments to interrupt into the Louvre to steal invaluable jewels as soon as worn by France’s queens and empresses, officials told NBC News after the theft.

Quite a lot of suspects have been subsequently arrested however the stolen objects haven't been recovered.

After the theft, des Automobiles described the second as a “tragic, brutal, violent actuality” for the Louvre and mentioned that, because the particular person in cost, it had felt proper to supply her resignation.

She had led the Louvre since 2021, at a time when the museum was nonetheless navigating the aftershocks of the pandemic and the return of mass tourism.

Many in France’s cultural world questioned why no high official had fallen after the heist: a daylight theft that many in France noticed as essentially the most humiliating breach of safety in residing reminiscence.

The museum has undergone a handful of different crises in current months. In one in all them, as much as 400 works in one of many Egyptian antiquities libraries within the museum have been broken in December when a pipe burst because of flooding.

In mid-December, staff on the museum went on strike over working circumstances, forcing the Louvre to halt operations and leaving guests stranded outdoors its iconic glass pyramid.

French authorities have additionally revealed a ticket fraud scheme. Prosecutors say tour guides are suspected of — as much as 20 instances a day — reusing the identical tickets to usher in completely different customer teams, at instances allegedly with the assistance of Louvre workers, in a system investigators imagine operated for a decade.

Des Automobiles was each the general public face of the Louvre’s modernization drive and the official left carrying the fallout from damaging failures.