The crime division of the judiciary police in Nice in the south of France is investigating the disappearance of the rough cut of a CD recorded by U2 on Tuesday. Lara Marlowe reports from Paris
The group had spent the day recording the album, its first in four years, and were shooting photographs for the cover at the Studios Riviéra in Nice using their recording as background music.
Around 9.30 p.m. someone discovered that the CD had gone missing. The police were initially perplexed by the panic over the disappearance of just one CD, but quickly understood the seriousness of the loss of an unreleased U2 album and summoned reinforcements from the central commissariat. They sealed off the building and searched everyone inside.
Forty-eight hours later, there was still no trace of the missing CD. It has not yet cropped on the Internet, the chief concern of the band and their label.
U2 are almost as famous in France as in the English-speaking world. Bono and The Edge own property at Èze, next to Monaco. Bono has a Legion of Honour, and likes to drop into the Élysée Palace for the odd chat with President Chirac about Third World debt.
Using the security register as a guide, detectives are questioning every one of the two dozen or so caterers, technicians, hairdressers, make-up artists, deliverymen and photographers who entered the studios on Tuesday evening.
The Nice police department is trying to change the city's image as a stronghold of the Russian Mafia.
The fame of U2 has increased pressure on investigators, with the interior and culture ministries reportedly taking an interest in what Nice-Matin called "an unexpected Affaire D'etat".