Gunfire echoed around the millionaires’ playground of St Tropez on Tuesday night as French police came under fire from four masked robbers including a woman.
The terrifying incident is the latest in a series of assaults on the forces of order in a country wracked by increasingly lawlessness.
It was at around 7pm that the heavily armed attackers raided an antiques salon in the centre of the port town.
The building was hosting a jewellery exhibition, and accordingly packed with dealers and clients buying expensive pieces.
Gunfire echoed around the millionaires’ playground of St Tropez on Tuesday night
‘The raiders were carrying shotguns and Kalashnikovs, and made straight for the first floor, ordering exhibitors to lie on the floorwith their hands showing,’ said an investigating source.
‘All were wearing military clothes, andlooked as though they were following a well-rehearsed plan.’
The attackers used the butts of theirweapons to smash reinforced glass jewellery cases open, and helped themselves to thousandsof pounds worth of items, a source told Var Matin newspaper.
The exhibition targeted had been set up by the Francine jewellery house, which is based in Marseille.
As the robbers escaped, police arrived inthe streets nearby, and immediately came under fire.
The building was hosting a jewellery exhibition, and accordingly packed with dealers and clients buying expensive pieces
A spokesman for prosecutors in nearby Draguignan said the police were unhurt, but all the robbers had managed to getaway.
One ‘is thought to be a woman’, while theother three were men, said the spokesman, who said the hunt was continuingovernight into Wednesday.
Terrorism has been ruled out, with prosecutors and judicial police focusing on robbers escaping a raid.
It came as the French government pledged a crackdown on urban violence after a policewoman was attacked by a mob on New Year’s Eve.
She was one of two officers who had attended a disturbance outside a party in the Paris suburb of Champigny-sur-Marne.
The woman and the captain were both severely injured in what French President Emmanuel Macron described as a’cowardly and criminal lynching’.
A third police officer was also beaten upon Monday when he went to inspect a stolen scooter in the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois.
French Interior Minister Gerard Collombsaid reforms were urgently needed in the ‘pauperised, ghettoised’ French suburbs that are likely to produce armed robbers, as well as homegrown terrorists.
Jewellery heists are as common on the French Riviera as they are in Paris, but it not usual for police to come under fire, especially not in a provincial town like St Tropez.
The seaside resort is better known for its celebrity residents, including cinema legend Brigitte Bardot who first made it famous with her 1956 film, And God Created Woman.