Three men believed to be members of the notorious ‘Pink Panther’ gang of jewel thieves have been arrested in Monaco.

The arrests were made outside the Monte Carlo casino last Thursday morning when the men were parking their Porsche 4×4 in Casino Square.  The square houses the world famous casino and a number of luxury jewellery shops.

According to Interpol, the notorious Pink Panther gang has been resonsible for over 100 robberies, many of them in France, Switzerland and the UK, but also as far afield as the US, Dubai, and Tokyo, where they grabbed the £17m Comtesse de Vendôme necklace in 2004.

The gang is thought to consist of around 200 members, many of them ex-soldiers from Eastern Europe, especially the Balkan states of Serbia and Montenegro.

Their first heist was the robbery of the Graff store in Mayfair back in 1993, where the thieves made off with jewels worth around half a million pounds. The gang’s total haul to date is said to be at least £150 million.

In a 2003 raid on Graff in London’s Bond Street, two members of the gang were eventually found guilty and sentenced for the theft of jewels totalling £23 million.  Their haul included a 2.32 carat blue diamond with a value at that time of about £500,000.  The diamond was later recovered in a Bayswater flat, hidden in a jar of face cream that belonged to the girlfriend of one of the robbers, calling to mind a scene in the original Pink Panther film starring David Niven.

But these robbers are very different to the ‘gentleman thief’ portrayed by Niven in 1963.  The modern Pink Pather gang is known for its use of considerable force: in 2007 members of the gang rammed two limousines through the front window of a Graff store at the Wafi mall in Dubai.

UPDATE on 23 June 2009: with uncanny timing just days after the Monaco swoop, police in Paris arrested 25 jewel heist suspects on Sunday night and yesterday morning. The arrests relate to the second most valuable jewel heist in history – the robbery of the Harry Winston boutique on Avenue Montaigne in Paris.

On December 4th last year four men entered the boutique, three of them disguised as women with wigs, sunglasses and scarves, and proceeded to brandish a grenade and a gun before making off with a haul of diamonds and other gems worth £75 million.

The involvement of the Balkan Pink Panther gang in the Harry Winston robbery is suspected, thanks in part to the Eastern European accented French that the robbers allegedly spoke during the robbery. However, French police sources are now indicating that most of the arrested suspects, aged from 22 to 67, are French citizens.

In any event, whether the Paris suspects are members of the Pink Panther gang or not, the last few days have seen some breakthrough arrests of some very serious alleged jewel thieves in both Monte Carlo and Paris.