![]() ![]() He slipped past security guards to enter a first-floor suite at the hotel, a setting for the classic Alfred Hitchcock crime thriller To Catch a Thief, through half-opened French windows that should have been closed. It was executed in a slick but hardly sophisticated operation by a solitary gunman dressed in dark clothes and brandishing an automatic pistol. The robbery has already been linked, in media reports, to the Pink Panthers, an energetic band of jewel thieves whose members have included hardened veterans of civil war in the former Yugoslavia. This figure, given by the public prosecutor's office in Nice, rivals a 2003 raid at the diamond centre in Belgium's gems capital, Antwerp, as the most lucrative in history. Overnight, the value placed on the proceeds of the theft from Leviev's Extraordinary Diamonds summer exhibition at the luxury Carlton Hotel had leapt from €34 million (Dh191 million) to €103m. ![]() Next day, a presenter on French radio was talking in excited tones about the hold-up of the century. NICE, FRANCE // Even on rough-and-ready first estimates, the latest brazen diamond heist in the glamorous French resort of Cannes produced a haul worth about the same as the fabulous London residence of the jewellery's owner, Lev Leviev.įor once, the media were being unduly cautious. ![]()
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