Nearly a dozen luxury watches have been stolen in the heart of the French capital by two masked robbers who targeted a boutique near the Elysee presidential palace.
One threatened an employee at gunpoint, and both wore high-quality masks that the stricken staff member, who is the father of the shop manager, said resembled human faces. The thieves were reported to have used the pretext of wanting to sell a Rolex watch before forcing the employee to stuff 11 watches into their bag. The watches were valued at €150,000 ($175,000).
“Suddenly they pulled out a gun and told my father, 'put everything in the bag',” Gary Azoulay, manager of the Our Watches outlet, said after the robbery on Monday. “They fired a shot, just to show my father it was a real gun.”
Mr Azoulay said he had gone out on an errand and his father was alone in the shop when the incident took place over a “maximum two minutes”. The shop is on Rue de Miromesnil in the eighth arrondissement of Paris.
“The Elysee Palace is there, and yet they still came to rob it knowing that the police were at the end of the street,” Mr Azoulay said.
A police source told daily newspaper Le Parisien that one of the two suspected robbers was arrested in the northern Paris suburb of Asnieres-sur-Seine, after an accident involving the scooter he was riding and a lorry. A bullet cartridge was recovered near the scene but by Tuesday afternoon the other suspect was still on the run.
Paris prosecutors have launched an investigation and said the masked robber had entered the shop pretending to be a client before displaying a weapon and firing into the wall. The employee was pulled violently into the entrance area of the shop before the robber fled with an accomplice waiting on a scooter.
