Luxury watches have been stolen in the heart of the French capital by masked scooter robbers who targeted a boutique store near the Elysee presidential palace.
The thieves threatened the shop owners at gun point and wore high-quality masks that a shop employee said resembled real human faces. The robbers were reported to have used the pretext of wanting to sell a Rolex watch before forcing the seller to stuff 11 watches in their bag. The watches were worth 150,000 Euros ($175,000).
“Suddenly they pulled out a gun and told my father, “Put everything in the bag.” They fired a shot, just to show my father it was a real gun,” Gary Azoulay, manager of the Our Watches shop told French television after Monday’s robbery.
Mr Azoulay said he had gone out to run an errand and his father was alone in the shop when the incident happened in a timespan of “maximum two minutes”. It took place in the eighth arrondissement, rue de Miromesnil.
“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 Le Parisien that one of the two robbers was arrested in the northern suburb of Paris of Asnieres-sur-Seine, after a traffic accident between the scooter he was riding and a truck. A cartridge was recovered but the other suspect remains on the run.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation and said in a statement to the media that the robber had entered the shop pretending to be a client before displaying a weapon and shooting into the wall. The employee was also violently pulled into the entrance area of the shop before the robber fled with an accomplice waiting on a scooter.