Where are the Louvre jewels now and can France get them back?

French police are desperate to retrieve priceless jewels stolen from the Louvre in a brazen daylight robbery, but experts warn it may be too late to save them.

Thieves in Paris on Sunday broke into the world’s most visited museum in a daring heist that lasted nearly eight minutes, stealing eight valuables before escaping on scooters.

Dutch art detective Arthur Brand told the BBC he feared the jewels might be long gone, broken into hundreds of pieces.

Other experts said it was likely the pieces were sold for well below their value and smuggled out of France.

Mr. Brand believes the group is professional, as evidenced by how quickly they entered and exited the Louvre.

“You know, as a normal person, you don’t think in the morning, ‘I’m going to be a thief, let’s start with the Louvre,'” he said.

“This won’t be their first robbery,” he said. “They had done other things before, other thefts as well. They were confident in themselves and thought they could get away with it, so they resorted to this method.”

In another sign that the gang’s professionalism was taken seriously, a specialist police unit “with a high success rate in solving high-profile robberies” was tasked with tracking them.

Authorities said they suspected the robbery was linked to an organized crime network. Mr Brand says this means the perpetrators are likely to have a criminal record and be known to the police.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said such organized crime groups usually have two targets. “Either to act for the benefit of a sponsor or to obtain precious stones to conduct money laundering operations.”

Mr. Brand thinks it would be impossible to sell the items intact and said a commission steal for a private collector is something that only happens in Hollywood movies.

“Nobody wants to touch a piece that’s that hot,” he explained. “You can’t show it to your friends, you can’t pass it on to your children, you can’t sell it.”

Mr. Brand believes that objects will be broken into pieces, gold and silver will be melted, and jewels will be broken into smaller stones that will be almost impossible to trace back to the Louvre robbery.

Jewelery historian Carol Woolton, who hosts the If Jewels Could Talk podcast and was Vogue magazine’s jewelery editor for 20 years, told the BBC that the robbers “willfully selected” the most important gemstones from the Louvre collection.

He said the “beautiful, large, flawless stones” would probably be removed from their mounting sites and sold, except for Empress Eugénie’s tiara, which had smaller stones inside and was “too hot to use.”

This may explain why it was dropped along with another item during the escape and was found by authorities.

Empress Eugenie’s stolen crown contained rare natural pearls of enormous value, experts say.

Although the items are said to be priceless, Mrs Woolton expects them to sell for well below their value.

“They will go to someone who wants to handle these things,” he said. “Everyone will look for these; they will take what they can get.”

Exactly how much money could they make if sold? Asked about the potential value of the move, Mr Brand said the cut pieces could be worth “millions”.

Stolen jewelery and gold could be worth up to £10 million (€11.52 million; $13.4 million), says Tobias Kormind, managing director of online jeweler 77 Diamonds.

He told the BBC that the gang would need a skilled expert to remove the jewels and a professional diamond cutter to replace the larger recognizable stones.

He said smaller stones that were not easily identified could be sold immediately and, although it was difficult to say the exact price of all the stones stolen, the larger ones could be worth around £500,000 each.

“There are at least four of this size, so when you add them all up and the gold, you’re probably approaching £10 million,” he said.

“The diamond and gemstone market is liquid and there are plenty of buyers who don’t ask too many questions.”

There are hopes that the items might one day reappear intact, but those hopes are dwindling as the days pass.

There is an example of this: the Cartier exhibition at the V&A Museum features a piece of jewelery that was stolen in 1948 and resurfaced at auction decades later.

What is certain is that many people in France were deeply shocked by the Louvre robbery and felt an emotional attachment to the jewels.

“We don’t necessarily like jewelry because it’s a matter of power and that doesn’t necessarily have a good connotation in France,” said Alexandre Leger, head of heritage at French jeweler Maison Vever.

“But inevitably what was stolen belonged to you as much as it did to me. It belongs to France, so everyone has a small piece of these objects, just as everyone has a small piece of the Mona Lisa.

“It’s like someone stole the Mona Lisa from us… Someone stole France.”

Additional reporting by Izumi Yoneyama.