Paris's Louvre museum closes gallery just weeks after jewel heist

The Louvre Museum has temporarily closed one of its galleries due to structural weaknesses.

It came just weeks after a four-strong gang carried out an audacious heist at the Paris landmark, making off with £77.5m worth of jewels. The Campana gallery, which houses nine rooms of ancient Greek ceramics on the first floor, was closed because its structures, designed in the 1930s, are in a dire state, the world's most-visited museum said.

A technical report showed weakness in the beams under the second floor of the Sully wing, making it necessary to close the Campana gallery on Monday and relocate 65 museum staff from the second floor, the Louvre said in a statement. On 19 October, two men parked a movers' lift outside the museum, rode up to the second floor, smashed a window and cracked open display cases with angle grinders.

The thieves drove away on motorbikes with historical jewels worth $102 million (£77.5 million). A stolen crown was dropped during the heist, but the other jewels have not yet been recovered.

Four suspects are being investigated. The Campana gallery is adjacent to the Apollo gallery, home to the French crown jewels that were targeted in last month's raid.

Before the heist, the museum's top administrator had warned about conditions inside the museum, which was visited by 8.7 million people last year. Valerie Baud of the CFDT, a French trade union federation, said staff representatives have been warning about the condition of the building for years because "it affects working conditions and visitors".

"But we didn't realise it was this bad," she said. "It is a major deterioration in the situation." A state auditor's report said the management had neglected security and infrastructure in favour of artwork acquisitions and post-pandemic relaunch projects.

Originally built in Paris in the late 12th century, the Louvre Palace was for centuries the official residence of the kings of France, until Louis XIV - weary of rebellious crowds in the capital - abandoned it for Versailles, after which it became a museum for the royal art collection in 1793..