Just how intimate are Carla Bruni’s stolen photos?

Conspiracy theorists who believe the theft of 'intimate' photos of Carla Bruni and her former lover Raphael Enthoven from a Left Bank apartment in Paris was the work of thieves aiming to make a killing out of selling them to celebrity magazines were dealt a blow yesterday by Paris police.

A spokesman for the gendarmes said they did not believe the thieves who stole a laptop and digital camera from the flat belonging to Enthoven's younger brother, actor Julien Enthoven, knew what they were getting.

"It was a banal burglary," the spokesman said. "Everything that was digital was stolen - as is often the case."

He also added - in a statement that most English-speaking websites have chosen to ignore - that it was "impossible to confirm whether photos of Carla Bruni have really been stolen, or how many."

And then there's the matter of just how "intimate' the images are likely to be, if there were any on the computer. Bruni and philosophy professor Enthoven had a child together - a boy called Aurelien, who is now eight. A British correspondent in Paris told The First Post: "The French word intime can translate not as 'intimate', in the way we journalists would use it, but as 'private'. The fact is, the thieves may have inadvertently got their hands on a lot of baby snaps."

Magazine editors and gossip columnists who have been filling the blogosphere with talk of "X-rated photos" and Bruni's "steamy past catching up with her", will be praying our man is wrong.

The flat on the Rue Dauphine was broken into on the night before the Sarkozys began their two-day state visit to Madrid. If Carla was worried about the theft, it did not show sure during the many photo-ops with Princess Letizia and Queen Sofia on Monday, nor with the Prime Minister Zapatero's wife, Sonsoles Espinosa, yesterday.