Former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour has cast blame on France’s open-door immigration system for the Crown Jewel heist at the Louvre Museum after reports emerged indicating that at least one of the suspects has an Algerian background.
On Saturday, French authorities arrested two men suspected of being involved in the sensational broad daylight robbery of the Louvre earlier this month. According to Le Monde, one of those arrested is a dual Algerian-French citizen, while the other is simply characterised as a French citizen. Neither has been named by police at the time of this reporting.
The arrests were made as one of the suspects was at Charles De Gaulle airport on the outskirts of Paris, reportedly attempting to flee to Algeria. The other was arrested in the multicultural Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis while allegedly seeking to make his way to the West African nation of Mali. Both suspects are also known to police for prior involvement in “sophisticated thefts”.
Following the initial reports on the suspected bandits, Reconquête (Reconquest) party leader Éric Zemmour declared: “Here comes Algeria taking the stage in the theft at the Louvre Museum! Immigration is stealing the Crown Jewels from us. In short, our civilization.”
Appearing on France 3’s Dimanche en politique news programme on Sunday, the former presidential candidate said that the Louvre heist was a part of the “everyday jihad” on the French way of life.
“They’re looting France’s treasures, they’re killing. It’s the trial of the Algerian woman who raped and massacred little Lola… It’s looting, theft, rape, everything an occupying army does. It’s exactly the same thing for me. I put it all on the same level,” he said.
“Obviously, there’s a hierarchy between murder and theft, obviously between harassment and rape, between stealing a cell phone, which, by the way, also goes to Algeria, you see. But all of that is a whole; it’s everything an occupying army does,” Zemmour added.
During his 2022 presidential candidacy, Zemmour often highlighted what he characterised as the negative ramifications on French society of the large influx of Algerians, who became one of the largest ethnic minorities in the country as a result of liberal visa rules granted to the former French colony after Paris ceded control of the region in 1962.
Zemmour, whose own Berber Jewish family immigrated to France in 1952 from Algeria before the outbreak of war, has called for “remigration” to the Maghreb region of Northern Africa, saying in 2022 that if he were elected president, he would negotiate with the leaders of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia to remigrate a million foreigners and to remove all “illegal immigrants, delinquents and foreign criminals” from France.
It remains to be seen how much immigration played a role in the Louvre heist, with two suspects still at large, and reports of a potential inside man at the museum. Despite the arrest of the two men on Saturday, authorities have yet to recover any of the $100 million in stolen jewels from the robbery. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said that while he remains “confident” that the Crown Jewels will be found, he noted that “unfortunately, loot is often stored abroad.”
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