At 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, what appeared to be a crew of workers parked a truck with a ladder and furniture lift next to the world’s busiest museum, the Louvre in Paris, according to news reports. On any given day, as many as 30,000 people tour the national gallery to look at some of the 35,000 artifacts on display in the former royal palace, which was turned into a national museum after the French Revolution. 

Two of the people dressed as workers climbed the ladder to a second-story balcony leading to the Galerie d’Apollon, where royal jewelry from when Napoleon ruled the country is on display, a Reuters report says. The crew, including at least one in a yellow safety vest, used angle grinders to cut through a window to access the gallery and then, while visitors and museum employees watched, broke into two glass displays holding some of the country’s crown jewels, which French President Emmanuel Macron in a statement called priceless. The thieves were back down the ladder and on the backs of two motor scooters to make their getaway seven minutes after parking the truck.

“It seems like a scenario out of a film or a television series,” Ariel Weil, mayor of central Paris, said in a New York Times report on the heist.

“How can they ride a lift to a window and take jewels in the middle of the day?” Magali Cunel, a teacher from near Lyon, said in a Guardian Report. “It’s just unbelievable that a museum this famous can have such obvious security gaps.”

The thieves didn’t have to spend much to pull off their heist. Angle grinders, which are ubiquitous in facilities management and on construction sites, are available for as little as $25 at Home Depot. And the kind of truck-mounted furniture elevator used in the heist – not commonly seen in the United States, where a different kind of lift is typically used – can be rented by the hour for as little as 70 Euros – roughly $82 –  in France.  

“It was clearly a team that had done some reconnaissance, was clearly also very experienced,” French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said in a Wall Street Journal report.

At least five museum staff members were either in or near the Apollo Gallery when the heist occurred, and none of them tried to stop the thieves, who used the angle grinders as weapons to keep people in the gallery at bay, according to the Times report. “Following the Louvre’s security protocol, [the staff] contacted the police, ‘prioritizing the protection of people,’” said the Times, quoting from a statement by Rachida Dati, the French minister of culture. 

Joseph Sanchez, a travel vlogger from Puerto Rico, was in the room displaying the Mona Lisa when the theft occurred and thought the museum was on fire or under attack when security staff began ushering people out, according to the Times report. Sanchez raced “through the museum halls and down the marble stairs with his family members,” the report said.  

Museum security across France has been on the government's radar screen all year, the Journal report said. In January, police gave leadership at the Louvre a list of security upgrades as part of a renovation announced by Macron, but the report didn’t say how much of the upgrades were undertaken.  

“There [hasn't been] much interest in securing these major museums,” Dati said in the Journal report. “Museums need to be adapted to new forms of crime.” The robbery follows additional museum thefts in France, including one at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and the Adrien Dubouché National Museum in the French town of Limoges, NPR reported.

The thieves took a royal sapphire necklace, a royal emerald necklace, earrings, a tiara and a sapphire necklace from the jewelry set of Queen Marie-Amélie and Queen Hortense, among other museum pieces, according to reports. At least one of the pieces had more than 1,000 diamonds. 

Because of the fame of the pieces, the thieves will unlikely be able to sell them but they could melt the pieces down and sell the diamonds and other gems and the gold to dealers. 

“The criminals were either targeting specific pieces for a collector or were targeting jewels that could be broken apart, melted down and resold,” the Journal report said.

Investigators are reviewing CCTV from the museum and riverfront, inspecting the basket lift used to reach the gallery and interviewing staff on site when the museum opened, AP reported.