French police hunt thieves who stole €25k in gold during pension protests

French police are looking for thieves who made off with €25,000 in coins and ingots from a gold shop during a protest against pension reforms, a prosecutor said.

Published: 18 April 2023 16:47 CEST

French police hunt thieves who stole €25k in gold during pension protests

Photo by BERTRAND GUAY / AFP

President Emmanuel Macron early on Saturday signed into law his deeply unpopular reform raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, further stoking outrage across the country.

As protests erupted in the western city of Rennes later that day, the manager of a gold shop, in the basement at the time, heard noises upstairs, prosecutor Philippe Astruc said.

“As protesters walked by outside, she noticed that three of the shop’s windows were broken,” he said.

As she opened the door to check on the damage, “two individuals rammed their way into the store. The first grabbed gold coins and ingots, while the second held her fast by her forearms,” he added.

They left with an estimated €25,000 worth of loot.

More than 1,000 people took part in the protest in Rennes on Saturday, which erupted in skirmishes between protesters and police, AFP reporters there said.

The previous night, after the country’s constitutional court approved the reform after three months of largely peaceful protests against it, several shop fronts were damaged in the city.

Rennes’ Socialist mayor Nathalie Appere told AFP that the town centre had been “pillaged” in the clashes.

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The French Jewish community, the third largest in the world, has for months been on edge in the face of a growing number of attacks and desecrations of memorials.

“National police in Rouen neutralised early this morning an armed individual who clearly wanted to set fire to the city’s synagogue,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Police responded at 6.45 am to reports of “fire near the synagogue”, a police source said.

A source close to the case told AFP the man “was armed with a knife and an iron bar, he approached police, who fired. The individual died”.

“It is not only the Jewish community that is affected. It is the entire city of Rouen that is bruised and in shock,” Rouen Mayor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol wrote on X.

He made clear there were no other victims other than the attacker.

Two separate investigations have been opened, one into the fire at the synagogue and another into the circumstances of the death of the individual killed by the police, Rouen prosecutors said.

Such an investigation by France’s police inspectorate general is automatic whenever an individual is killed by the police.

The man threatened a police officer with a knife and the latter used his service weapon, said the Rouen prosecutor.

The dead man was not immediately identified, a police source said.

Asked by AFP, the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office said that it is currently assessing whether it will take up the case.

France has the largest Jewish community of any country after Israel and the United States, as well as Europe’s largest Muslim community.

There have been tensions in France in the wake of the October 7th attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel, followed by the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

Red hand graffiti was painted onto France’s Holocaust Memorial earlier this week, prompted anger including from President Emmanuel Macron who condemned “odious anti-Semitism”.

“Attempting to burn a synagogue is an attempt to intimidate all Jews. Once again, there is an attempt to impose a climate of terror on the Jews of our country. Combating anti-Semitism means defending the Republic,” Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF). wrote on X.

France was hit from 2015 by a spate of Islamist attacks that also hit Jewish targets. There have been isolated attacks in recent months and France’s security alert remains at its highest level.