PARIS (AP) — It was not long after the stunning robbery of royal regalia at the Louvre When Parisian Associated Press photographer Thibaut Camus captured a dapperly dressed young man walking past uniformed French police, their car was blocking one of the museum's gates.
Instinctively he fired.
“It was not a particularly good photograph: someone’s shoulder obscured part of the foreground,” Camus told himself.
But it did its job, the French police showed isolate the most visited museum in the world after brazen robbery in broad daylight last Sunday.
Moreover, as Camus calculated, the guy passing by the officers was unusually well dressed, wearing a coat, jacket, tie and fedora, which added a touch of Parisian fashion to the scene.
And now the photo has reached AP's global audience.
After that, the fertile imagination went into full swing, causing a stir on the Internet.
Social media posts said the well-dressed man was a French detective — a dashing version, if you will, of the famous Inspector Clouseau from the “Pink Panther” films — although the AP photo caption did not identify him.
It simply read: “Police block access to the Louvre following a robbery on Sunday, October 19, 2025, in Paris.”
The post on X, which now has 5.6 million views, says: “A real shot (not AI!) of a French detective working the case of the French Crown Jewels stolen from the Louvre.”
Another poster, which had 1.2 million followers, claimed that the man “who looks like he stepped out of a 1940s noir detective film is a real French police detective investigating a theft.”
Camus says nothing he saw led him to that conclusion – the man was simply a man who ran away from the Louvre when authorities evacuated the area, Camus says.
“He appeared in front of me, I saw him, I took a photograph,” says Camus. “He passed by and left.”
If the unidentified man is indeed one of the more than 100 investigators hunting the jewelry thieves, authorities are keeping it under wraps.
“We would prefer to keep the mystery alive ;),” Paris prosecutors said with a wink in an emailed response to questions from the AP.
