In October 2016, Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint – with jewellery worth millions of dollars stolen during the audacious heist in Paris.

It was the biggest robbery of an individual in France for more than 20 years – and made front pages around the world.

Now, almost a decade on, the case is finally coming to court.

Why has it taken so long? Will Kardashian give evidence? And who exactly are the “grandpa robbers” facing trial?

Here’s everything you need to know.

What happened?

Two years after Kardashian and rapper Kanye West tied the knot in an ostentatious week-long celebration spanning Paris and Florence, the Kardashian-West clan were back in the French capital for Paris Fashion Week.

Her then husband had returned to the US to pick up his Saint Pablo tour – but Kardashian, along with her sister Kourtney and various members of their entourage, remained in Paris, staying in an exclusive set of apartments so discreet they’ve been dubbed the No Address Hotel.

Nestled on Tronchet Street, just a stone’s throw from Place de l’Opéra, and close to the fashionable Avenue Montaigne, the Hotel de Pourtalès is popular with A-list stars staying in the French capital.

A stay in the Sky Penthouse, the suite occupied by Kardashian, will currently set you back about £13,000 a night.

On the evening of 3 October, after attending a fashion show with her sister, Kardashian remained in the apartment alone while the rest of her convoy – including her bodyguard Pascal Duvier – went out for the night.

At about 2.30am, three armed men wearing ski masks and dressed as police forced their way into the apartment block – and according to investigators, they threatened the concierge at gunpoint.

Two of them are alleged to have forced the concierge to lead them to Kardashian’s suite. He later told police they yelled at him: “Where’s the rapper’s wife?”

Kardashian said she had been “dozing” on her bed when the men then entered her room.

She has said she believes her social media posts provided the alleged robbers with “a window of opportunity”.

“I was Snapchatting that I was home, and that everyone was going out,” she said in the months after the incident.

The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star vividly described the attack in a police report, as reported in the French weekly paper Le Journal du Dimanche.

“They grabbed me and took me into the hallway. They tied me up with plastic cables and taped my hands, then they put tape over my mouth and my legs.”

She said they pointed a gun at her, asking specifically for her ring and also for money.

Kardashian says they carried her into the bathroom and put her in the bathtub. She said she was wearing only a bathrobe at the time.

She had initially thought the robbers “were terrorists who had come to kidnap me”, according to a French police report taken in New York three months after the robbery.

Kardashian told officers: “I thought I was going to die.”

According to police, the robbers – who left the room after grabbing their haul, escaped on bicycles with items estimated to be worth about $10m (£7.5m), including a $4m (£3m) 18.88-carat diamond engagement ring from West.

After they had left, Kardashian said she escaped her restraints and went to find help. After speaking to detectives, she immediately returned to the US on a private jet and later hired a completely new security team.

What was stolen?

As well as her engagement ring, Kardashian said the thieves took her large Louis Vuitton jewellery box, which she said contained “everything I owned”.

In police reports given to the French authorities at about 4.30am on the night of the alleged robbery, Kardashian listed these items as having been stolen:

• Two diamond Cartier bracelets
• A gold and diamond Jacob necklace
• Diamond earrings by Lauren Schwartz
• Yanina earrings
• Three gold Jacob necklaces
• Little bracelets, jewels and rings
• A Lauren Schwartz diamond necklace
• A necklace with six little diamonds
• A necklace with Saint spelt out in diamonds
• A cross-shaped diamond-encrusted Jacob cross
• A yellow gold Rolex watch
• Two yellow gold rings
• An iPhone 6 and a BlackBerry

Police recovered only the diamond-encrusted cross that was dropped by the robbers while leaving.

It’s likely the gold in the haul was melted down and resold, while the diamond engagement ring that is now so associated with the robbery would be far too recognisable to sell on the open market.

What will happen in court?

The hearing will begin at the Court of Appeal of Paris – the largest appeals court in France – on 28 April and is scheduled to last a month.

It will consist of a presiding judge, two professional assessors, and six main jurors.

The hearing involves more than 2,000 documents and there are four civil parties.

Who is being tried?

There were initially 12 defendants in the case, but one person has died and another has a medical condition that prevents their involvement. This means 10 people – nine men and one woman – are standing trial.

Five of them, who were all aged between 60 and 72 at the time of the incident, face armed robbery and kidnapping charges. They are:

• Yunice Abbas
• Aomar Ait Khedache
• Harminv Ait Khedache
• Didier Dubreucq
• Marc-Alexandre Boyer

Abbas, 72, has admitted his participation in the robbery. In 2021, he published a book about the robbery, titled I Kidnapped Kim Kardashian. In 2021, a court ruled he would not benefit financially from the book.

Aomar Ait Khedache, 69, known to French crime reporters as “Old Omar”, has also admitted participating in the heist but denies the prosecution’s accusation that he was the ringleader.

The remaining five defendants are charged with complicity in the heist or the unauthorised possession of a weapon. They are:

• Florus Heroui
• Gary Mader
• Christiane Glotin
• François Delaporte
• Marc Boyer

Among those, Mader was a VIP greeter who worked for the car company Kardashian used in Paris, and Heroui was a bar manager who allegedly passed on information about Kardashian’s movements.

With many of the accused now ageing and with various serious health conditions, and some having spent time in jail following their arrest, all are currently free under judicial supervision.

If found guilty, those accused of the more serious crimes could face 10 years to life imprisonment.

Will Kardashian give evidence?

Yes.

Lawyer Michael Rhodes said Kardashian has “tremendous appreciation and admiration for the French judicial system” and “wishes for the trial to proceed in an orderly fashion in accordance with French law and with respect for all parties to the case”.

A trainee lawyer herself, Kardashian has become a high-profile criminal justice advocate in the US in recent years.

Why has it taken so long to come to court?

There was initially a manhunt after the robbery, with French police under pressure to prove that Paris’s security was not in question.

Just the year before in 2015, the capital had been shaken by terrorist attacks by Islamic militants, in which 130 people were killed, including 90 at a music event at the Bataclan theatre.

French police initially arrested 17 people in the Kardashian case in January 2017 – three months after the robbery – assisted by DNA traces found on plastic bands used to tie her wrists. Twelve people were later charged.

It was ordered to be sent to trial in 2021 – at a time when limited court proceedings were happening due to multiple COVID lockdowns, and France was holding its largest ever criminal trial over the November 2015 terror attacks.

What has Kardashian said about the incident?

Kardashian has described the robbery as a “life-changing” moment. She took three weeks away from filming her reality TV show Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and took a three-month break from social media.

In a March 2017 episode titled Paris, Kardashian first spoke publicly about her ordeal.

She described first hearing a noise in her apartment, and calling out, thinking it was her sister and assistant: “At that moment when there wasn’t an answer, my heart started to get really tense. Like, you know, your stomach just kind of like, knots up and you’re like, ‘OK, what’s going on?’ I knew something wasn’t quite right.”

She went on: “They asked for money. I said, ‘I don’t have any money’. They dragged me out to the hallway on top of the stairs. That’s when I saw the gun, clear as day. I was looking at the gun, looking down back at the stairs. I was like, I have a split second in my mind to make this quick decision.

“Either they’re going to shoot me in the back or if I make it [down the stairs] and the elevator does not open in time or the stairs are locked, there’s no way out.”

Three months later, she told a Forbes Power Women’s Summit she had changed her approach to posting on social media: “They had followed my moves on social media, and they knew my every move and what I had.”

She added: “It was definitely a huge, huge, huge lesson for me to not show off some of the things that I have. It was a huge lesson to me to not show off where I go.

“It’s just changed my whole life, but I think for the better.”

In October 2020, Kardashian told US interviewer David Letterman she feared she would be raped and murdered during the heist, and that her sister had been at the forefront of her mind during the incident.

Speaking on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Kardashian said: “I kept on thinking about Kourtney, I kept on thinking she’s going to come home and I’m going to be dead in the room and she’s going to be traumatised for the rest of her life if she sees me… I thought that was my fate.”

When speaking to French police about the impact the robbery had had on her three months after it, Kardashian said: “I think that my perception of jewellery now is that I am not as attached to it as I used to be. I don’t have the same feeling about it. In fact, I even think that it has become a bit of a burden to have the responsibility of such expensive jewels.

“There is nothing of sentimental value to compare with the act of going home and finding one’s children and one’s family.”

She went on to describe Paris as “not the right place” for her, and didn’t return to the French capital for two years following the robbery.

Kardashian has since said in a 2023 episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians that she did not purchase any jewellery in the seven years following the robbery, kept no jewellery at her home and only wore items that are either borrowed or fake.

She said the realisation that material items don’t matter has made her “a completely different person in the best way”.

First he took the US on a collision course with China. Then he came for the rest of the world.

He crashed into the financial markets and now Donald Trump has been gently tapping on the brakes all week.

The world’s economic policymakers have been on quite the journey over the past few months.

Many of them will have felt a little queasy as they got off the plane in Washington DC for the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) annual spring meetings.

This was their opportunity to talk. To strategise, strengthen alliances and figure out their next move.

Rachel Reeves was in the mix. While all the focus has been on a US-UK trade deal – and she is due to meet her US counterpart on Friday – the chancellor was also here to meet her G7 and G20 allies.

Countries across the world are eager for Mr Trump to reduce his tariffs but they are also looking to each other, reflecting on how the world might look in the future and whether the US is a reliable long-term partner.

That much was obvious from a conversation with Paschal Donohoe, Ireland’s finance minister and president of the Eurogroup.

He told Sky News that Ireland, a highly US-orientated economy, was diversifying.

That being said, he was “more optimistic than some” that a high level of trade integration would prevail well into the future.

“What I think is very possible is the structure of that globalisation could begin to change,” he said.

That changing structure might include a rejection of China’s decades-long model of export-led growth.

Since joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001, China has been pumping out cheap goods into the world economy, making far more than it consumes at home.

Poor countries across the world have taken a similar approach to development but the US Treasury secretary said on the sidelines of the IMF on Wednesday that it was “absurd” for multilateral institutions to continue treating China like a developing economy.

He called for a “rebalancing”.

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There is a recognition among world leaders that some of Mr Trump’s grievances are reasonable.

They believe his approach is the wrong one but in interviews they are now talking about the negative consequences of trade imbalances and globalisation – the impact on communities and the undercutting of wages.

That wasn’t the case just a few months ago.

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Ms Reeves took it one step further. On Wednesday, the Treasury announced plans to tackle the dumping of cheap goods into the UK – no doubt aimed at China.

She announced a review of the customs’ treatment of low-value imports.

Currently goods valued at £135 escape the duty. The US has already taken action.

In an interview with Sky News, she said she was acting in the “national interest” but she is also looking for common ground with the Americans, as she seeks a deal that secures a reduction in tariffs.

Speaking to US media on Thursday, she reiterated her shared concerns: “I absolutely understand the concerns the United States have about imbalances in trade in the global economy, particularly when it comes to China that runs large, persistent trade surpluses with countries around the world, including the US and indeed including the United Kingdom.”

The IMF too. While the Fund sharply downgrades global growth forecasts, it shied away from openly criticising the US president.

Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF’s managing director, spoke of an erosion of trust between countries, and “concerns about the uneven distribution of gains from economic integration, its impact on the international division of labour, supply chain security, and global imbalances”.

So, Mr Trump has got policymakers to shift their priorities.

At the very least, he has brought a long-simmering issue to the boil. The world is thinking differently about China now.

The US is also showing signs that it’s thinking differently. After a bruising showdown with the bond markets, Mr Trump has rowed back on his liberation day tariffs.

The administration has softened its language, saying it wants reform and to work with institutions.

The president said tariffs could come down substantially on China.

However, a lot of damage has already been done – not only his erratic tariffs policy, but also his attack on institutions, including the US Federal Reserve.

The world is now thinking differently about the US too, as are the markets.

Investors normally dive into US assets – government debt and the dollar – during times of turmoil, but Mr Trump’s pronouncement has caused traders to do the opposite.

There are signs that the world is losing faith in the US’ ultimate safe haven status.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has said the US and Russia are moving in the “right direction” to end the war in Ukraine.

“We are ready to reach a deal, but there are still some specific points – elements of this deal which need to be fine-tuned,” Mr Lavrov told CBS News’ Face The Nation show, which will air on Sunday.

“We continue our contacts with the American side on the situation in Ukraine, there are several signs that we are moving in the right direction.”

It comes after Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv came under the largest attack since July last year with at least 12 people killed and more than 100 injured.

Ukraine’s air force said a total of 215 drones and missiles were launched at the country by Russia on Wednesday night, with Kyiv among the areas worst hit.

Ukrainian officials said rescuers were still recovering bodies from the rubble.

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The strikes triggered a reaction by Mr Trump, who posted on his Truth Social platform saying: “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV.

“Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!”

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The US president was then asked about the Russian attacks while hosting Norway’s prime minister in the Oval Office, and said he “wasn’t happy” but insisted “we’re putting a lot of pressure on Russia”.

He was also asked about Crimea following reports that his peace plan includes the US acknowledging Moscow’s control of the territory.

Mr Trump admitted it would be “very difficult” for Ukraine to get the territory back, but reiterated his belief that “we’re getting close to a deal”.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio said the US wanted to see both Ukraine and Russia step up to finalise a deal and further discussions were planned for the weekend.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeated many times that recognising occupied territory as Russia’s is a red line for his country.

Speaking about the airstrikes, he said: “It is very important that everyone in the world sees and understands what is really happening.”

Mr Zelenskyy was on a visit to South Africa when the missiles hit his country, prompting him to cut the trip short.

He said preliminary information indicated that Russia “used a ballistic missile manufactured in North Korea” and Ukraine’s special services were verifying the details.

He added if the missile was found to have been made in North Korea, it would be further proof “of the criminal nature of the alliance between Russia and Pyongyang”.