'Grandpa robbers' held Kim Kardashian at gunpoint - but didn't know who she was

The morning after the heist, burglar Yunice Abbas went home to catch up on some sleep. When he woke up, his wife was glued to the TV. The headline news of the day was that American reality TV star Kim Kardashian, 35, had been tied up and robbed at gunpoint in a luxury Paris apartment. All her jewellery had been taken for a sum of about $10m (£7.5m) – including the engagement ring her then-husband and rapper Kanye West gifted her, which alone was worth $4m (£3m). Yunice Abbas' wife glared at him. "This has you written all over it," she grumbled. She was right. The 62-year-old had dabbled in crime his whole life, from petty offences to bank heists. The Kardashian robbery, he later wrote in a memoir, was going to be his last job before retirement. But a series of blunders meant the heist was doomed from the start and in early 2017 - three months after the robbery - Abbas and several of his alleged accomplices were arrested. Ten of them will now be appearing in court in Paris in a trial set to last just under three weeks. Out of those, five are accused of taking part in the heist, and six are accused of being accessories to the crime. Most of them were born in the 1950s, leading French media to dub them the "grandpa robbers". Abbas and a 68-year-old man, Aomar Ait Khedache, have confessed; the others have not. One has since passed away, and another, aged 81, will be excused as he is suffering from advanced dementia. By the time the trial starts, almost nine years will have gone by since the heist. On the night between 2 and 3 October 2016, Abbas and four accomplices allegedly staked out Kardashian's discreet suite in Hotel de Pourtalès, in the glitzy Madeleine neighbourhood in Paris, not far from the Opéra and Place Vendome. At around 03:00 local time, they burst into the hotel's entrance hall, dressed as policemen and wielding a gun. They threatened and handcuffed Abderrahmane Ouatiki, an Algerian PhD student who regularly took up shifts as night receptionist, and marched him up to Kardashian's room. She was resting on her bed, tired from days of attending Paris Fashion Week events, when she heard stomping up the stairs. She called out for her sister Kourtney and her stylist Stephanie, but when they didn't answer she panicked. "I knew someone was there to get me," she recalled in an interview with US interviewer David Letterman years later. "You just feel it." Kim dialled 911 but the number, of course, didn't work outside of the US. As she was calling her then-security guard Pascal Duvier - who had accompanied her sister to a club - the men burst in, pushed her on the bed and started shouting. "They kept on saying: the ring, the ring! And I was so startled that it didn't compute for a minute," she told Letterman. The language barrier meant Ouatiki had to act as an interpreter. They grabbed the ring and several other jewels, as well as 1000 euros in cash. One of the men grabbed her and pulled her towards him. Because she was wearing a robe with nothing underneath, she thought he was going to assault her, Kim later told Letterman, wiping tears away. But instead – using the technique of saucissonnage, or the practice of tying them up like a saucisson, a salami - the man bound her with zip ties and duct tape, and left her in the bathroom. Then, he and the rest of the burglars fled on bikes and on foot. Kim freed herself of her restraints, and shortly after her security guard turned up. Traumatised, Kim gave a statement to French police in the early hours of the morning and flew back to the US by dawn. It wasn't until the next morning, when Abbas caught a glimpse of the TV screen his wife was watching, that he understood who their victim was. "There were breaking news alerts saying Kim Kardashian had been robbed at gunpoint – that's how important it was," says LA-based entertainment journalist KJ Matthews. "We were so fascinated with her and her family and their rise to fame... When the heist happened we were so surprised. How could burglars have gotten so close to her?" Matthews says. But while mistakes were made in terms of Kardashian's security, serious errors were made on the burglars' side, too. "They didn't take into account the progress made by police techniques, which can now find micro traces of DNA anywhere," said Patricia Tourancheau, a crime reporter and the author of "Kim and the grandpa robbers" - a thorough account of the heist and of the lives of its perpetrators. "When they dressed up as police they thought 'that's it, nobody will be able to recognise us'," she adds. But in 2016 Paris was still reeling from the terrorist attacks of the previous year, and there were a huge number of CCTV cameras all round the city, meaning police were able to spot the thieves and see them make off with the jewels. Other details of this story suggest that the thieves' planning was rather haphazard. When fleeing the scene on a bike, Abbas fell, dropping a bag of jewels. The next day, a passer-by found a diamond-encrusted necklace and wore it all day at the office before watching the news and realising where it had come from. Police arrested Abbas and several other people in January 2017 and later confirmed that they had been under surveillance for several weeks, after DNA traces left at the scene provided a match with Aomar Ait Khedache, also known as "Omar the Old". French media published a photo from the police stakeout, which shows several of the men having coffee and chatting at a Parisian café that winter, just before their arrest. The question that remains - and which will undoubtedly be explored doing the trial - is just how the gang got wind of Kardashian's schedule. Court documents seen by the BBC show that both Khedache and Abbas stated that all the information they needed was posted online by Kardashian herself, whose very career was built on sharing details about her life and movements. But how did the gang know that on the night of 2 October Kardashian would be alone in her room, without her security guard? Court documents indicate police believe Gary Madar, whose brother Michael's firm had provided transportation and taxis to the Kardashians for years, was an accessory to the heist and that he had fed information to the gang about Kim's whereabouts. Mr Madar was arrested in January 2017. His lawyer Arthur Vercken vehemently pushed back against the accusations, telling the BBC that "since the start the case was built on assumptions, theses, theories - but no proof [of Madar's involvement] was ever found". He added that although the Madar brothers exchanged texts about the Kardashians during Fashion Week it was just because they were "bored" and that when the heist took place Gary was asleep. Gary's brother, Michael, is not a defendant. "Five men did this. You don't think one of them was keeping an eye on who was coming and going from her hotel?" he said, suggesting that Mr Madar had only been arrested "to prove that the French justice system works". The trial will also attempt to determine where the jewels ended up. Police tracking of the gang's phones showed that soon after the heist Omar the Old travelled from Paris to Antwerp in Belgium, where 50% of the world's polished diamonds and 80% of rough diamonds are sold, according to the Diamond Investment Office. Many jewels were reportedly melted or broken up and sold. Abbas got 75,000 euro (£64,000); others far less. As for Kim Kardashian's engagement ring, Omar the Old said the gang was too scared to sell it on as it would be too easily traceable. It has never been found. Kim Kardashian was undoubtedly spooked by the event, which marked the start of her social media hiatus. In an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, she tearfully recalled the night of the heist and said had been scared for her life; later she also said the robbery had made her a "less materialistic person". Soon after the incident her sister Khloe told The Ellen DeGeneres that, for safety reasons, the Kardashian family were making some changes to how freely they posted on social media. "The biggest change was her security detail," KJ Matthews told the BBC. Patricia Tourancheau, the author of the book about the heist, said she was "fascinated" by the "clash between these old-style burglars from the Parisian banlieue and this global social media star". "They fled on bikes and she flies around on private jets," she laughed. "These are a group of elderly down-and-out thieves, they're always broke, they're forever involved in convoluted plans… and they're facing a huge celebrity and they don't even know who she is." The gang was not "elite" as it was suggested in the early days, she added. "This isn't the creme de la creme of French banditry. They're a bit of a bunch of losers, really. They're the same kind of people who in the 60s and 70s would burglar banks or post offices and who then rebranded to drug trafficking and then moved on to jewels because it was easier," she said. Around mid-May, Kim will face the suspects for the first time in years when she takes the stand as a witness. Cameras are not allowed in French courts but her arrival to the tribunal on Ile de la Cité alone will inevitably spark the same media frenzy that has accompanied her for over a decade. In his memoir, Abbas expressed the hope the victim's status and the global resonance of the case would not influence judges unduly. However, he also said that on the last day of the trial he would bring a duffle bag with his belongings, ready to be sent to jail. "The problem with the past," he wrote, "is that it sticks with you as long as you live".