Wednesday, July 29, 2009
AFP - Wednesday, July 29BAGHDAD (AFP) - - Bank robbers made off with at least 3.8 million dollars in a pre-dawn raid on Tuesday, leaving eight police guards dead in one of Iraq's biggest-ever heists.
Police said the raid had likely been the work of insurgents looking to replenish their funds with help from an inside source, as the robbery took place a day after a large transfer of cash to the bank and no doors or windows were damaged.
"I have never seen such a brutal crime," an employee at the Al-Rafidain bank branch in the central Karrada shopping district told AFP.
"Now robberies have become like foreign movies -- they steal and kill and disappear," she said, declining to give her name out of fear for her safety.
The eight guards were found in the bank's basement with their hands tied behind their backs, tape covering their mouths, each with a single gunshot wound to the back of the head.
Police said the robbers used pillows to muffle the sound of the gunshots while killing the guards, seven of whom were found wearing nothing but their underwear, with the eighth still in uniform.
"This operation was carried out by a terrorist element who lost their foreign funding... and started to seek internal funding, like stealing from banks," a police officer at the scene told AFP.
Iraqi security forces closed off streets leading to the bank, while senior army and police officers were at the scene to investigate.
A detective who did not want to be named told AFP that there were two likely scenarios: one guards could have been helping the thieves, who then decided to kill him; or a guard working on another shift at the bank may have convinced his colleagues to open the door for the gang.
Bank guards who work on the overnight shift are instructed not to open the doors for any senior officials.
Another bank employee, who also did not want to be identified, said: "I hope to see the criminals hanged on the door of the bank, to be a lesson for all others who think of stealing and killing like this."
The thieves stole 4.5 billion dinars (3.8 million dollars) in large denomination bills, leaving behind a further 1.1 billion dinars in smaller currency, just a day after the 5.6 billion dinars were transferred to the bank.
The bank's three-metre (10-foot) high safe was opened by a welding machine, a process that likely took more than an hour and a half because of the safe's 20-centimetre (eight-inch) thick door, police said.
Another bank employee said the break-in had probably occurred at around 4:00 am (0100 GMT).
"It was all done in a professional manner," a police officer said.
The heist follows a failed robbery at a Baghdad currency exchange shop on Sunday in which four security guards were killed and four other people wounded.
In Iraq's biggest-ever hold-up, robbers stole 13.5 million dollars from a Rasheed Bank branch in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, in January 2005.
No comments:
Post a Comment