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People queuing at the entrance to the Louvre in Paris
Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images
It houses what is probably the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, and is one of the most visited museums.
Now the police in Paris have uncovered an illegal trade in used tickets at the Paris Louvre Museum.
As reported by French police circles on Saturday, 14 suspects were arrested.
According to the newspaper Le Parisien, the dealers had taken the tickets from visitors who had just come out of the museum.
Then they resold the tickets to tourists waiting in line at the entrance.
The dealers therefore sold paper and electronic tickets and asked for more than the original purchase price.
The police operation on Wednesday "enabled the arrest of 14 people, eight of whom were taken into police custody," a police official said.
The other six suspects therefore had no residence permit and are now in custody pending deportation.
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Louvre in Paris: Man throws cake at Mona Lisa
There have been headlines about the museum in recent weeks: the former director of the museum, Jean-Luc Martinez, is suspected of being involved in art fraud worth millions.
It's about Egyptian artefacts for a branch in Abu Dhabi.
And at the end of May, a man disguised as a woman suddenly got out of his wheelchair and threw a cream cake at the image of the Mona Lisa.
Since there had already been several attacks on the painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the past, the picture has been behind protective glass for several years.
The Louvre in Paris is the world's largest museum and has over hundreds of thousands of works of art in its collection.
In 2021, 2.8 million people visited the Louvre - before the corona pandemic, there were around ten million visitors a year.
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