Thieves wearing balaclavas pulled off a brazen daylight heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris on Monday, stealing priceless jewellery once owned by monarchs.
Using a crane to smash an upstairs window, a group of four people made off with jewels worth an estimated 88 million euros ($157.3 million), according to Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau.
But it was not the first museum jewellery heist this century to resemble a Hollywood movie.
Thieves have executed bold raids to varying degrees of success in recent years, despite the difficulty in profiting from such a crime.
Here is a look back at two infamous capers to steal near-priceless jewels.
The Green Vault heist
The air was crisp in Dresden, Germany, during the early hours of November 25, 2019, when a firebomb fashioned out of a cooking pot and petrol exploded on Augustus Bridge.
A nearby power box was swallowed by the blaze, disabling streetlights and security alarms.
Metres away, two men slipped through an old metal grate that covered a corner window of the Green Vault.
The museum, which encompasses the first and second floors of Dresden Castle's western wing, contains the largest treasure collection in Europe.
Their path had been meticulously planned.
The window they had chosen was out of the view of a nearby surveillance camera.
One week prior, they had cut into the grate protecting its glass pane with "jaws of life" rescue tools.
Now inside the Green Vault's Jewel Room, the men began smashing through three glass displays with an axe, swiping the precious contents which had once belonged to monarchs.
Light from the men's torches swept across the dark hall, briefly illuminating the polished checkerboard floor and gilded walls.
Two private security guards on duty were forced to watch the heist unfold through a security camera feed, unable to intervene due to strict rules that prevented them from confronting the intruders.
As police raced to the scene the men fled back through the corner window, loading their spoils into an Audi station wagon with stolen plates.
A ceremonial sword with a diamond-encrusted hilt, glittering brooches and pendants were among the priceless treasurers snatched up in just minutes.
In total, the jewellery in their haul comprised 4,300 diamonds.
The value of the stolen items was estimated to be more than 113.8 million euro ($204 million).
For months, it seemed as though the crew of the audacious heist had successfully evaded police capture.
They had burned their getaway cars and used burner SIM cards during the robbery.
But about a year after they made off with the jewels, nearly 1,700 police officers stormed into apartments and private businesses as part of raids across Berlin, arresting the three members of the crew.
It was revealed the men and their accomplices were part of the Remmo clan — one of Germany's most notorious crime families.
On May 16, 2023, five Remmo family members were convicted and sentenced for the heist.
Two were already serving time for a previous major heist — the theft of a 100-kilogram Canadian gold coin with a wheelbarrow and an estimated value of 3.75 million euro ($6.7 million).
Nearly five years later in 2024 the Green Vault reopened to visitors with most of the jewellery back on display in their original places.
The Millennium Dome raid
At the turn of the century a dome-shaped building on London's Greenwich Peninsula was home to a major exhibition celebrating the third millennium.
Inside were a variety of attractions open to the public through the year 2000 — a play area dubbed the Timekeepers of the Millennium, a coin minting press, and a 1951 Festival of Britain bus.
But it was a flawless 203.04-carat pear-shaped diamond named the Millennium Star that caught the eye of a ragtag gang of would-be thieves.
The gemstone was the centrepiece of a collection of eleven priceless blue diamonds at the Millennium Dome.
The plan? Conduct a ram-raid and make off in a speedboat down the Thames.
Some of the crew — Lee Wenham, Raymond Betson and William Cockram — made several visits to the Dome during September, casing the area and a nearby jetty.
The security, they felt, was lax.
"There was nobody in the vault, no security workers walking around," Cockram later said.
It took some time for the crew to pull the trigger on their carefully orchestrated plans.
In early October they aborted an attempt because the getaway speedboat was malfunctioning.
Days later they called off another attempt when they realised the tide was too low to ensure a safe getaway.
Ultimately, the gang decided to execute their operation on November 7.
Wearing body armour and gas masks, four men piled into an excavator.
They used the machine to plough through a perimeter fence and crash through a side wall of the Dome.
Once inside, they began attacking the glass cases housing their quarry with sledgehammers under the cover of smoke bombs.
Little did they know the diamonds had been replaced with worthless replicas in anticipation of their raid.
Police had caught wind of their plans months prior and had been monitoring their every move under what they called Operation Magician.
To the crew's surprise the dome was crawling with hundreds of officers disguised as workers, or hidden behind a fake wall, waiting for the robbery to begin.
All suspects in the case were swept up by police and detained, with the dome partially re-opening later that day.
Six of the seven-member crew were tried and found guilty of conspiracy to steal. Their accomplice, Terry Millman, died of cancer before the trial could commence.
The failed heist became the focus of a three-part documentary executive-produced by Guy Ritchie in 2025.
