Thieves who robbed Kim Kardashian West at gunpoint were targeting possessions seen on social media, police said after the multi-million pound jewellery raid.
The reality TV star left Paris on a private jet just hours after she was robbed of jewellery reportedly worth £9 million at an exclusive private apartment building.
Police in the French capital have described the incident as “extremely rare” and said the robbers were focused on “possessions that had been seen and noticed via social media”.
Four days ago, Kardashian West posted a close-up photograph of a huge diamond ring on her left hand captioned with three diamond emojis.
The TV star, who was attending Paris Fashion Week, was “badly shaken but physically unharmed” after masked men dressed as police officers robbed her, her spokeswoman said.
Johanna Primevert, chief spokeswoman for the Paris police department, told the Associated Press: “This is the result of people who obviously posed as policemen and who assaulted Ms Kardashian in a private hotel in her room by threat of a weapon.
“This kind of incident is extremely rare in Paris. This is a star who is famous worldwide. Do not confuse what happened to Ms Kardashian and probably was the result of an organised team who had planned their action with the assault of a tourist in front of Notre Dame (cathedral) or another tourist spot in Paris.”
She said the losses were estimated at several million euros, adding: “Clearly when you have a star like Kim Kardashian who has, I think, more than 48 million followers on Twitter … I think this could have happened abroad just as easily as in Paris.
“It was really the celebrity who was targeted, with possessions that had been seen and noticed via social media, and it was these goods that the attackers targeted.”
Only two of the five suspects forced their way into the apartment, in the eighth district of Paris behind the Madeleine church, according to the city’s prosecutors’ office.
Two police officials told the Associated Press that robbers tied up Kardashian West and locked her in the bathroom before escaping on bikes.
Kardashian West’s husband, rapper Kanye West, was performing at the Meadows Music and Arts Festival in New York when he was told the news on stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxZ6j2MzcQg
He abruptly stopped his set, in the middle of his song Heartless, and told the crowd: “I’m sorry, family emergency, I have to stop the show.”
Just days before the attack, Kardashian West heaped praise on her German bodyguard Pascal Duvier after he protected her from a notorious celebrity prankster who tried to accost her while she was entering a restaurant.
She wrote on Twitter: “My security @PascalDuvier is a G.”
Hours before the armed raid she shared a photograph of herself on Twitter, with Duvier in the background, captioned: “This guy is always in my shot!”.
He was photographed accompanying Kardashian West’s sister Kourtney on Sunday night and has since been seen climbing on to the private plane in Paris.
