PARIS: French authorities on Tuesday arrested four more people in the probe into last month`s spectaculardaylighttheft of imperial jewels from the Louvre museum, the top Paris prosecutor said.

`They are two men aged 38 and 39, and two women aged 31 and 40, all from the Paris region,` Laure Beccuau said, following earlier charges against four others over the heist.

On October 19, a fourperson gang raided the Louvre, the world`s mostvisited art museum, inbroad daylight, taking just seven minutes to steal jewellery worth an estimated $102 million before fleeing on scooters.

The thieves parked a moving truck with a ladder below the museum`s Apollo Gallery housing the French crown jewels, ascended in a bucket, brolce a window, and used angle grinders to cut into glass display booths containing the treasures.

The four already charged over the theft include three men and a woman.One of those men, a 37-year-old, was in a couple with the woman and they have children, Beccuau said earlier this month.

The couple was arrested after their DNA was found in the baslcet lift used during the robbery.

The man`s criminal record contained 11 previous convictions, most of them for theft.

The thieves dropped a diamondand emeraldstudded crown that once belonged to Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III, as they escaped. Butthey made off with eight other items of jewellery, including an emeraldand-diamond necklace that Napoleon I gave his second wife, Empress Marie-Louise.-AFP