‘Grandpa robber’ behind Kim Kardashian Paris heist recalls that 2016 night
Leo Vignal/AFP via Getty Images
(PARIS, FRANCE) — Kim Kardashian made a defiant walk into Paris’ Palace of Justice in May, to face the criminals who held the reality star at gunpoint and robbed in 2016. The trial’s shocking outcome would only prompt more questions.
Ten suspects, dubbed the “Grandpa Robbers” by French media because most of them were in their 60s and 70s, stood trial in Paris for the notorious 2016 jewel heist that terrorized the reality star.
Despite finding eight of the 10 suspects guilty of crimes related to the 2016 heist, the French court allowed all defendants to walk free, with some receiving suspended sentences or credit for time already served. The judge cited the defendants’ ages and health concerns as reasons for leniency. Two were acquitted.
The crime occurred during Paris Fashion Week in October 2016, when Kardashian was staying at the exclusive “No Name Hotel,” reportedly known for hosting celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Madonna. That night, while Kardashian’s security detail accompanied her sister Kourtney to a nightclub, the robbers struck.
In an interview with ABC News, Yunice Abbas, one of the convicted robbers, said he didn’t even know who Kardashian was at the time.
“I was always told ‘wife of an American rapper,'” Abbas said.
The robbers, wearing fake police jackets, first confronted the hotel’s night concierge, Abderrahmane Ouatiki. They forced him at gunpoint to lead them to Kardashian’s suite.
“When you feel the cold steel of a gun on the back of your neck, you have to be calm,” Ouatiki told ABC News. “You have to be wise in such situations.”
The thieves escaped with more than $6 million worth of jewelry, including Kardashian’s upgraded 18.8-carat wedding ring from then-husband Kanye West. In their hasty bicycle getaway, Abbas admitted to falling and spilling some of the stolen jewels on the street.
Following the verdict, Kardashian, who has become an advocate for criminal justice reform, released a statement.
“While I’ll never forget what happened, I believe in the power of growth and accountability and pray for healing for all. I remain committed to advocating for justice, and promoting a fair legal system.”
The outcome of the trial surprised even the defendants. When asked if he expected the lenient sentence, Abbas responded with a simple “No” as he left the courthouse a free man.
The unexpected verdict left some questioning the French justice system.
“I respect Kim Kardashian, but I call foul. Justice was not served,” legal commentator Nancy Grace told ABC News. “They should be in jail for what they did.”
(TOKYO) — While the European Union has vowed to impose countermeasures if the Trump administration moves forward with its planned 30% tariffs on all EU exports to the U.S., another key strategic ally, Japan, is taking a different approach.
Unlike the European Union, the Japanese government has made no indication it plans to impose any kind of reciprocal tariff on the U.S., even if the U.S. does move forward with its planned 25% tariffs on all Japanese exports.
“We have no intention to change” the Japan-U.S. ally relationship, a Japanese government official told ABC News. “We will cooperate with the United States to make a win-win situation.”
While the European Union has vowed to impose countermeasures if the Trump administration moves forward with its planned 30% tariffs on all EU exports to the U.S., another key strategic ally, Japan, is taking a different approach.
Unlike the European Union, the Japanese government has made no indication it plans to impose any kind of reciprocal tariff on the U.S., even if the U.S. does move forward with its planned 25% tariffs on all Japanese exports.
“We have no intention to change” the Japan-U.S. ally relationship, a Japanese government official told ABC News. “We will cooperate with the United States to make a win-win situation.”
Japan has attempted to remain calm since President Donald Trump first announced potential tariffs on all Japanese exports this spring, sticking with a strategy of steady diplomacy, a promise to invest further in the U.S. and patience.
Japanese government officials have met with their U.S. counterparts seven times since Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s initial meeting with Trump at the White House in February, the Japanese government official said. Trump and Ishiba also met on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada in June before Trump cut his trip short.
Ishiba was the second world leader to visit Trump at the White House after he took office in January.
Hideo Kumano, Japanese chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute, warned if the U.S. tariffs are imposed on Japanese goods, Japan will likely see a recession.
“It’s inevitable to see some kind of damage,” Kumano told ABC News. “There is a possibility that we will fall into recession.”
But Kumano said he doesn’t think Japan should retaliate like some other countries have to Trump’s tariff threats.
“Trump is emotional, and countries like India or Brazil, they reacted in the same manner, and they also wanted to punish such a policy and impose high tariffs in response,” Kumano said. “Europe is insinuating something like that, but I don’t think Japan should do the same.”
Instead, Kumano believes Japan should “smile superficially” and then “behind the scenes,” prepare for the potential impacts of the coming tariffs.
“Behind the scenes, Japan or Japanese companies should react to potential impact of the tariffs and control or manage the transactions with the U.S.,” Kumano said.
LONDON — The “Make America Great Again” roadshow arrived in Europe this week with events in two nations where American conservatives see prime opportunities for a new transatlantic political culture — one molded by President Donald Trump’s right-wing populism and imbued with grand “clash of civilizations” rhetoric.
The Conservative Political Action Conference — CPAC — opened its week of European events on Tuesday in Jasionka, Poland, where Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was among the speakers, urging Poles to vote for right-wing presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki in this weekend’s runoff election.
Noem eschewed the diplomatic norm of non-alignment in elections in allied nations, as have other administration officials including Vice President JD Vance. “You will be the leaders that will turn Europe back to conservative values,” she told attendees in Jasionka.
“We need you to elect the right leader,” Noem said, dismissing Nawrocki’s rival — liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski — as “an absolute train wreck of a leader.”
“Donald Trump is a strong leader for us, but you have an opportunity that you have just as strong of a leader in Karol if you make him the leader of this country,” Noem said.
CPAC’s next stop will be in Budapest, Hungary, on Thursday, hosted by populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban — a totem of the European anti-establishment right wing who has long enjoyed cozy relations with Trump.
Peter Kreko, the director of the Political Capital Institute in Budapest, said Orban is positioning himself as “another recipient of the MAGA soft power export.”
“Orban is still positioning himself as someone who is exporting his campaign tactics, who can help others in terms of campaign consultancy and provide help from the United States,” Kreko said. “He’s trading off of his good partnership with Donald Trump.”
On the web page promoting CPAC’s Hungary event, the organization hit out at “corrupt elites” who it said “betray all that once made us great: patriotic virtue has been replaced by internationalism, common sense by bureaucracy and tradition by woke madness.”
“People on both sides of the Atlantic have risen up against this repackaged version of socialism, but success can only be complete when the tides of change converge and the age of patriotism begins at both poles of the West,” CPAC wrote.
Internationalism is front and center in the CPAC event agendas. Among the speakers in Budapest will be American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Yair Netanyahu — the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party.
Also attending will be a host of other European conservative politicians from Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, France, Estonia and Greece — among others.
“With the triumph of Donald Trump and the rise of the European Right, the Age of the Patriots of Western Civilization has begun — CPAC Hungary 2025 will be the hub of this movement,” the organizing website said.
But the CPAC events come at a moment of peril for transatlantic relations. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs threaten to touch off a costly trade war with the European Union.
Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the bloc. “Now we’re going to charge the European Union,” Trump said when unveiling his tariff plans in April. “They’re very tough. Very, very tough traders. You know, you think of the European Union, very friendly. They rip us off. It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.”
Trump announced last weekend that his planned 50% tariffs on EU goods would be delayed into July. But the bloc remains on a collision course with the Trump administration.
The economic and political aspirations of all EU leaders rely heavily on the bloc’s own fortunes, even for those populist leaders like Orban who so often define themselves in opposition to the grand European project.
The president’s European offensive could yet sour budding ties between the MAGA movement and its foreign allies, if the latter’s “core interests appear directly threatened by Trumpism,” Celia Belin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and head of its Paris office, told ABC News.
Kati Piri, Hungarian-born member of the Dutch parliament and the Labour Party’s spokesperson for foreign affairs, migration and asylum, told ABC News in a statement that “Trump’s unilateralist policies are designed to hurt all Europeans, and that so-called allies will not be spared.”
“Trump’s continued threats of tariffs on EU products and global trade wars are making him an unpopular friend to have — and this is fragmenting the unity of the global right,” Piri suggested.
The glitz and glamour of CPAC’s Budapest event will be welcome for Orban, Kreko said, as the prime minister grapples with his own domestic challenges — not least the meteoric rise of liberal opposition leader Peter Magyar.
Around 10,000 people rallied in Budapest earlier this month to protest government plans to restrict the rights of independent media organizations — the latest in a wave of large protests against Orban and his Fidesz party government.
Kreko said Orban’s popularity is flagging after 15 years of uninterrupted power, even as he positions himself at the forefront of the nascent right-wing “illiberal international.”
“Orban is nowhere as popular as he was, let’s say in 2022, when he won the last elections,” Kreko said. “His popularity is waning, he is having a hard time getting it back and he also uses increasingly authoritarian tools to be able to keep power.”
“He has a hard time at home persuading his own constituency that the regime he is promoting all over the world is as powerful, as beautiful, as successful as it is seen by the MAGA camp in the United States,” Kreko added.
Trump’s America has become the center of gravity of the global right-wing movement — with the weight of the federal government and the broader national conservative movement behind it.
This week Samuel Samson — a senior advisor for the State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — gave an indication of the prevailing winds in American transatlantic policy, publishing an article setting out “the need for civilizational allies in Europe.”
Claiming the existence of “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself,” Samson accused European governments of having “devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”
Opening the CPAC event in Poland on Tuesday, chairman Matt Schlapp told attendees, “The globalists intend to take each one of us out one by one — to shame us, to silence us, to bankrupt us, to ruin us, to make our kids turn against us.”
That is why, he said, it was important to “win all these elections, including in Poland, that are so important to the freedom of people everywhere.”
For now, Kreko suggested the transatlantic MAGA project is incomplete, as did recent election results in Romania, Portugal and the first round of Poland’s presidential vote in which conservative and far-right candidates did not win power.
“What is common between Trump, Orban and many others in central and eastern Europe is that they really want to build this illiberal international,” Kreko said.
“But at the same time, we also have to be careful about overestimating its impact,” he said.
(LONDON) — At least 66 Palestinians have been killed in shootings near aid distribution sites on back-to-back days in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.
At least 30 people were killed in a shooting on Wednesday near an aid site close to the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. This is one of the four operational aid sites run by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
In relation to the shooting, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement it was “currently unaware of IDF fire during daylight hours that corresponds with the footage circulated in the media.” The video was “under review,” the IDF said.
However, the IDF said it did fire “warning shots” overnight Wednesday toward people who it said were “advancing while posing a threat to the troops.”
“The IDF is aware of reports regarding individuals injured, the details are under review,” the statement said.
The shooting Wednesday came one day after at least 36 were killed, the highest one-day death toll from a shooting near an aid distribution center since the opening of the GHF sites last month, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution site in central Gaza, according to two local hospitals in Gaza. Over 100 people were injured in the shooting, according to the two hospitals.
The IDF said in a statement on Tuesday that troops fired “warning shots to distance suspects,” who were advancing in the area and “posed a threat to troops.”
The Israeli army said the warning shots were fired “hundreds of meters form the aid distribution site,” before it opened.
“The IDF is aware of reports regarding several individuals injured in the area,” it said. “An initial inquiry suggests that the number of reported individuals injured does not align with the information held by the IDF.”
“The details are under review,” the IDF said.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — which has been running aid distribution in Gaza since Israel lifted its 11-week blockade last month — resumed aid distribution on Monday after previous shootings near aid sites, saying it gave out 1,386,000 meals at two sites. The GHF has not specified what it considers a meal.
The GHF has closed its aid distribution sites several times since it began distributing meals after several shooting incidents. As of Wednesday, at least 224 people had been killed while trying to get aid from GHF aid distribution sites, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The blockade was instituted to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages taken during Hamas’ surprise terror attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people and led to the capture of hundreds, Israel said.
The GHF was first announced on May 19 — three days after the Israeli government began its increased military operation in Gaza. After the end of an 11-week Israeli blockade on aid entering Gaza, the GHF — a private contractor backed by the U.S. and Israel — took over distributing aid in Gaza.
Humanitarian groups and the United Nations have said the GHF politicizes aid and criticized the role of IDF forces in the operation.
Palestinians in Gaza remain at risk of extreme starvation and famine even after Israel lifted the blockade on all humanitarian aid entering the Strip, according to aid groups like the U.N., the International Committee of the Red Cross and others.
The death toll in the 20-month Hamas-Israel war also crossed 55,000 on Wednesday, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health. There have been another 127,394 injuries during the war, the health ministry said.
