French police seek 3 suspects after brazen Paris bank raid

Police were hunting for three men who held up a bank just off Paris' Champs-Elysees avenue Tuesday, tying up staff and customers for hours while ransacking safety deposit boxes, officials said.

The armed men rushed into the Milleis bank at around 8:30 am (0730 GMT) shortly after it opened, immobilising several people and spraying them with an unidentified liquid.

They rifled through some 30 safe-deposit boxes, a source close to the investigation said on condition of anonymity.

Formerly called Barclays France, the bank boasts high-end clients, and its Champs-Elysees branch is only around 650 metres (710 yards) from the French presidential palace.

The robbers "took a number of hostages amongst employees when the bank opened. They then put up a sign on the door saying the bank was closed," Eddy Sid, a spokesman for the FO police union, told BFM television.

"They then forced open some deposit boxes. Once that was done they left the employees in the bank -- and they were able to free themselves around lunchtime and call the police," Sid added.

Despite high security in the area, the men got away with their haul. Nobody was injured, and the value of the stolen items was not immediately known.

"We saw nothing, heard nothing. It was when police arrived that we found out what was going on," a nearby shopkeeper, who gave his name as Pierre, told AFP as investigators swarmed the area.

Luxury jewellers are regularly targeted by thieves in Paris, but gangs have also set their sights on super-rich visitors in recent years.

In October 2016, five men tied up and robbed US reality television star Kim Kardashian of jewellery worth nine million euros whilst she was staying in a luxury residence hotel in the French capital.

There have also been a string of attacks on vehicles heading to and from Le Bourget airport, which handles private jet departures from Paris.

Among them, two Qatari women in a chauffeur-driven Bentley were robbed of jewels and other items worth more than five million euros (USD 5.7 million) in 2016.

In January last year, some four million euros worth of jewels were stolen in a smash-and-grab raid at Paris's Ritz hotel, on Place Vendome -- a square celebrated for its jewellers -- but police quickly arrested the robbers and recovered the jewels.

Security around Place Vendome was reinforced in 2014 after five high-end jewellery and watch stores were hit by armed robberies in less than seven months. The losses in those attacks ranged from 420,000 euros to two million euros.

In other attacks, a lone gunman attacked a bank near the Arc de Triomphe monument in February last year, but was shot and arrested by police.

And in 2017, two men held up a luxury watch-makers just off the Champs-Elysees, getting away with items worth several hundred thousand euros.