PARIS (AP) — It was on the heels of an amazing event. The Louvre Crown Robber Thibaut Camus, a Paris-based Associated Press photographer, captured a dapperly dressed young man walking alongside a uniformed French police officer who was blocking one of the museum’s gates with his car.
Instinctively he took the shot.
Camus told himself that it wasn’t a particularly great photo, with someone’s shoulders obscuring part of the foreground.
But it did the job – showed the French police Lock down the world’s most visited museum after that brazen daylight robbery Last Sunday.
Additionally, the man walking past the police was unusually dressed, wearing a trench coat, jacket, tie, and fedora, which Camus thought added a touch of Parisian couture to the scene.
The photos were then sent to AP’s global audience.
From there, a rich imagination accelerated and created a buzz online.
Social media posts declared the well-dressed man to be a French detective — a more dashing version of the famous Inspector Clouzot from “The Pink Panther,” if you will — even though he was not identified in the Associated Press photo caption.
It simply read: “On Sunday, October 19, 2025, a robbery occurred in Paris and police officers prevented entry to the Louvre.”
X’s post, which has now been viewed 5.6 million times, reads: “An actual shot (not AI!) of a French detective working on the case of the French Crown Jewels stolen from the Louvre.”
Another poster, who has 1.2 million followers, claimed the man “looks like something out of a 1940s detective film noir and is a real French police detective investigating a theft.”
Camus stated that nothing he saw led him to such a conclusion. Camus said the man was simply someone who had fled the Louvre as authorities evacuated the area.
“He appeared before me, I saw him and took a picture,” says Camus. “He walked past and left.”
If the unidentified man is indeed one of more than 100 investigators pursuing the jewel thief, authorities will keep it top secret.
“We would rather keep the mystery alive ;),” the Paris public prosecutor’s office said with a wink in an email in response to questions from The Associated Press.
