Six Arrested Following €12M Robbery on Gold Refining Lab in France

A group of six individuals equipped with assault rifles and handguns employed explosives to force entry into a gold treatment facility located in Lyon, France, causing light wounds to five employees during described as the newest significant daytime heist to affect the nation.

The audacious robbery took place on the afternoon of Thursday, with officers rapidly detaining the suspected perpetrators and retrieving the loot assessed at around €12M (10.5 million pounds), as stated by authorities.

Five staff members of the gold refining company were slightly hurt due to the explosion, and three individuals required hospital checks for examination, officials confirmed. A total of twenty-eight staff were present on-site when the thieves struck.

Those arrested, considered career criminals, were taken into custody soon afterwards in the nearby town of Vénissieux, France, authorities revealed.

A female accomplice who participated in the raid was taken into custody as well, a police source indicated.

“Six individuals who utilized explosives in an attack on a gold refining facility in the Lyon area were apprehended red-handed,” the French interior minister stated online, praising officers for their “decisiveness, speed and control”.

Assault rifles, handguns and explosives were recovered as well.

The robbery occurred as French police on the same day detained five further people, among them a key figure, in regarding this month's brazen Louvre museum robbery.

Numerous detectives have been searching for four thieves who employed a truck featuring an elevating platform and cutting gear to access a gallery on the first floor at the prestigious institution on the nineteenth of October, making off with precious items estimated to be worth €88M.

In a different significant robbery, robbers the previous month broke into the Natural History Museum in Paris, stealing gold samples worth over $1 million. A 24-year-old Chinese woman was taken into custody recently in Barcelona, Spain in relation to the burglary, according to legal authorities.

The sequence of heists has raised concerns in France regarding inadequate security measures at museums and other institutions housing valuable items.