Robbery of banks and cellars full of wealth is one of the favorite topics around which police movie scenarios revolve around in the West, but the reality sometimes seems more imaginative and exciting.
The first robbery took place in Kent County, southeast England on February 21, 2006, and whoever carried it out of a money safe carried £52 million in cash. It is the largest cash theft in UK history.
Crime events first-hand:
Criminals have kidnapped the safe's manager, Colin Dixon, as well as his wife and child. Dixon was driving home in the evening when, suddenly, a police car turned on its beacon. The man was asked to pull over to the side of the road. A man in police uniform approached him and took him to his car. There, he was handcuffed and taken to an abandoned farm outside the city.
Simultaneously, two other "police officers" informed the principal's wife and eight-year-old son that Colin had been in a terrible accident and offered to take the family to hospital. An hour later, the family joins Colin Dixon at the same abandoned farmhouse.
At one o'clock in the morning, the manager, his wife and son were taken to the money warehouse. They put them in a white van with a number of masked men armed with pistols and rifles.
The thieves made their way to the money vault, and once there, they rushed inside and handcuffed and gagged the workers there. The warehouse was taken over almost immediately, and the number of hostages rose to 17. The attackers then loaded bags of money into their truck and fled.
The funny thing is that one of the reasons that prompted them to settle for stealing exactly 52 million pounds sterling was that the truck could not accommodate more!
The hostages who were placed in the cages where the money was kept managed to free themselves and get out after half an hour, and reported the strange armed robbery to the police!
The police found a lead in the case, managed to arrest two suspects, and by March 2006 managed to find and recover £ 19.7 million.
It was later discovered that the mastermind of the complex robbery was a famous artist named Lee Murray, who was involved in a series of thefts, and this man was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Five others involved in this crime were also arrested, while the rest of the thieves, more than 30 in number, remained at large for a long time. The police kept chasing and caught them one by one, and one of the suspects was shot dead in his home on July 11, 2019, and he was the 39th in this gang.
As for the most unusual and mysterious robbery, it took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on December 20, 2004, when thieves stole 26 million pounds sterling and a half million from Danske Bank.
The details of this bank robbery are still unknown, although the international police conducted extensive investigations about it.
In an operation described as quite complex, a gang of three masked men took the families of two of the heads of this bank hostage at gunpoint, Chris Ward and Kevin McMullan.
The gang held my two families hostage for 24 hours, while the two bankers, who had access to the bank's cash vault, were forced to go to work.
In the evening, when all the bank employees left the building, the two bankers stayed inside, in order to allow the gang members to enter the building, fearing for the lives of the hostages.
The thieves entered the bank as if they had entered their homes, and carried in batches bags of money to a car parked near the building, until their loot was completed and its value was equal to 26.5 million pounds sterling between liquid money of various hard currencies, and banknotes.
The mystery of the robbery remained elusive, and the perpetrators and those involved were not known. Even the head of the local police in Northern Ireland, during a press conference in January 2005, accused the Provisional Irish Republican Army of being responsible for the operation, while the leadership of this army denied any connection to the bank robbery.
Police suspected the two bankers who had been taken hostage and threatened by the gang were involved, and one of them, Chris Ward, was arrested in November 2005 and charged with theft. However, the Public Prosecution office did not provide any evidence to the court, and he was released.
Although some were arrested and others were convicted as part of the investigations conducted, none of them were specifically involved in this robbery. The case remains mysterious until now.
Source: RT