Armed thieves stormed the Bulgari luxury jewelry store on the famous Place Vendome in central Paris in broad daylight, Saturday, April 29, 2023, and stole items worth millions of euros, according to the French police and the Public Prosecution Office.
Where a police source explained, quoting preliminary information, that three people arrived on two motorcycles and entered the store in the famous tourist neighborhood at around 13:45 local time (11:45 GMT). The same source added that two of them were carrying rifles, indicating that they had wounded a security guard.
The French newspaper Le Parisien said that two armed criminals stormed the Bulgari jewelry store while a third partner was waiting outside, where they first hit the security guard on the head with the butt of a weapon before seizing as many jewels as possible, and indicated that at the time of the accident there were about ten employees and several of clients on site.
Paris: la bijouterie Bulgari, place Vendôme, cible d'un braquage pic.twitter.com/eik1Ap1blt
— BFMTV (@BFMTV) April 30, 2023
Another source familiar with the investigation said that the full size of the spoils and damages estimated at millions of euros are still being assessed, according to the BBC website .
Videos posted on social media, Saturday, showed two large motorcycles parked on the sidewalk in front of the jewelry store. It also shows a man wearing a helmet, holding a gun and wearing black clothes watching. The Paris prosecutor’s office announced the opening of an investigation into armed robbery.
While the Bulgari store itself was targeted in an armed robbery in broad daylight in September 2021, the thieves then stole items worth about 10 million euros.
Following the robbery, one of the robbers was shot in the leg by a policeman. In June 2022, two more suspects were arrested and placed in pretrial detention.
