By Alessandro Parodi
PARIS (Reuters) -Police have made further arrests linked to the Louvre heist, in which jewels worth $102 million were stolen from the museum’s Apollo gallery, home to the French Crown Jewels, French media reported on Thursday.
French radio station RTL said five new suspects had been arrested simultaneously in different parts of the capital on Wednesday evening, citing judiciary sources.
French TV station BFM had said earlier on Thursday that a man suspected of being present at the crime scene when the brazen daylight robbery took place had been detained.
The Paris prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to a request from comment.
The new arrests follow the detention over the weekend of two men suspected of breaking into the museum through an upstairs window and stealing the precious pieces. The pair had “partially admitted” their involvement in the heist under interrogation, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau told a press conference on Wednesday.
The heist exposed security lapses at the world’s most-visited museum and was seen by many as a cause for national humiliation.
Beccuau said on Wednesday she did not rule out the possibility of a larger group, including a person who could have ordered the theft and been the mastermind behind it.
The jewels remain missing.
(Reporting by Alessandro Parodi;Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Richard Lough)
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