The thief of the legendary artist's paintings turned out to be a student drug dealer

One of the thieves of paintings by the legendary impressionist Auguste Renoir, stolen from a museum on the French Riviera, turned out to be a 29-year-old student drug dealer. Nice-Matin reports.

The theft occurred on September 8 at the Renoir Museum in Caen-sur-Mer. The thieves cut off the fence, broke a window and took four paintings by the artist from the museum. They dropped two of them in the garden when they ran away. The total value of the stolen works is estimated at approximately nine million euros (about 900 million rubles).

The suspect is a student from a wealthy family named Loic: his father works as a doctor, his mother teaches, and he himself studied in Nice, where he lived in an apartment fully paid for by his parents. Inspired by the Netflix series, he organized an online store for illegal substances. During a search in 2020, almost 700 thousand euros in cash (about 70 million rubles), nine kilograms of cocaine, 13 kilograms of ecstasy, four kilograms of MDMA and two kilograms of ketamine were seized from him. Loic was arrested, but released in 2022 due to a procedural violation identified in the investigative chamber. At the same time, the drug trafficking case itself, for which he was detained in 2020, should be considered in court only in 2027.

During the investigation, the student's DNA was found on items discarded at the crime scene and then matched to a sample from a law enforcement database. A total of six people were detained in the case. Loic has already appeared before the investigating judge of Marseille to face charges.