Kim Kardashian's Paris hotel robber, who helped steal more than $10 million in jewelry from the reality star, blamed her for the heist: 'They should be a little less showy toward people who can't afford it'

• A robber who stole from Kim Kardashian in 2016 said he didn't feel guilty about the heist.
• "Since she was throwing money away, I was there to collect it," he said in a Vice News interview.

One of the robbers involved in the 2016 heist of Kim Kardashian's Paris hotel room said he didn't feel guilty about the incident that traumatized the reality star.

In 2016, masked robbers broke into Kardashian's room at the Hôtel de Pourtalès during Paris Fashion Week, where they tied her up and duct-taped her mouth and eyes shut as they stole nearly $11 million of her jewelry at gunpoint.

The reality star opened up about the harrowing experience in a 2020 interview with David Letterman, describing the incident as "seven or eight minutes of torture" as she feared she would be raped or killed.

In an interview with Vice News released Saturday, Yunis Abbas, one of the 12 men arrested and charged in connection to the 2016 robbery, said even though he had "no doubt" that Kardashian would be traumatized in the incident, he didn't feel guilty about the heist.

"They should be a little less showy toward people who can't afford it," he said. "For some people, it's provocative."

Abbas told Vice News that before the heist he didn't know much about Kardashian but knew of her then-husband, Kanye West. He said he looked more into the reality star online to determine how rich she was and what valuable belongings she had.

"I saw one of her shows where she threw her diamond in the pool, in that episode of 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians,'" he said. "I thought: 'She's got a lot of money. This lady doesn't care at all.'"

He added: "Since she was throwing money away, I was there to collect it and that was that. Guilty? No, I don't care. I don't care."

He described how he and the other men involved in the robbery planned the heist, saying they entered the hotel through an open door to the side of the building and "took control of the concierge."

"We overpowered him, we tied him up," Abbas said. "Then we looked for the keys to the bedroom she stayed in."

"I stayed downstairs," he added. "But two of my colleagues went upstairs with the concierge to go to Ms. Kardashian's room, then they picked up the jewelry [and] went downstairs."

Abbas told Vice they were able to escape after Kardashian's assistant at the time called the emergency line for the US instead of France.

Since the incident, Kardashian said she had changed her social-media habits, no longer posting photos in real time to protect her privacy.

"I might take a photo, save it, post it when I leave the place or when I'm in a different location, because I don't think that worked out for me so well when I was posting every last detail," Kardashian said in a 2017 interview on "The View." "I've learned from experience."

She told Letterman in 2020 that she was scared to sleep after the robbery "unless there's half a dozen security guards at my house."

Kardashian has also said the traumatizing experience made her less materialistic.

"I just don't care about that stuff anymore," she told Ellen DeGeneres in 2017. "I really don't."