Gang Steals $39 Million From Belfast Bank in Complex Heist

In what appears to be one of the biggest heists in British history, a gang of thieves made off with at least $39 million in cash from the vaults of a Northern Ireland bank swollen with pre-Christmas receipts, police said Tuesday.

The planning and military precision displayed in the robbery, which involved the abduction of families of two bank officials, led to speculation that the robbers might belong to one of the province’s paramilitary forces that are said to have turned into criminal gangs.

The robbery took place at the underground cash center in the headquarters of the Northern Bank, just opposite City Hall in downtown Belfast. It occurred after the close of business Monday as adjacent streets were still crowded with holiday shoppers.

However, the operation began late Sunday night when heavily armed men burst into the homes of two senior bank executives and took their families as hostages and moved them to undisclosed locations, authorities reported.

According to accounts in Belfast, the hostage-takers forced the executives go to work as normal on Monday and, after the bank was closed, used them to gain access to the highly secure area of the cash vaults.

The cash was taken away in a large truck that nosed its way into a narrow side street yards from the City Hall plaza, known as Donegall Square. Images of the truck may have been captured on security surveillance cameras in the area.

Police did not learn of the crime until 11:45 p.m., hours after the cash had been removed, newspapers reported.

At a televised news conference late Tuesday, Belfast’s assistant chief constable, Sam Kinkaid, said the bank executives’ families had been held hostage for about 24 hours and were traumatized by the experience.

Although no details of the abductions were released, authorities said one of the family members needed treatment for hypothermia after being exposed to the cold overnight. No one else was reported injured.

Kinkaid said he could not specify the amount of money taken, but called it “quite considerable” and said it might even exceed $39 million.

As many as 20 gunmen were involved in the robbery, but Kinkaid said it was too early to determine whether they were paramilitary fighters.

“This was not a lucky crime, this was a well-organized crime,” he said.

A city councilor, Jim Rodgers, called it “the latest in a series of horrendous kidnappings.”

“It looks in this case as if there were professionals involved and also the possibility of paramilitary involvement,” Rodgers was quoted in the Belfast Telegraph. “Police need to step up their protection of banks, and the banks themselves need to look at measures which will provide security for their staff members.”

According to Britain’s Press Assn., police in Northern Ireland believe that more than 200 organized criminal gangs are operating in the province of 1.5 million people.

The gangs are said to be involved in armed robbery, drug trafficking, prostitution and counterfeiting. In addition, at least some of these have been linked to nationalist Catholic or loyalist Protestant political groups, whose paramilitary forces have been in a state of uneasy peace since a 1997 Irish Republican Army cease-fire.

Hostage-taking for large ransoms has become an increasingly common tactic. In one case this summer, a gang linked to the dissident Irish National Republican Army paramilitary group was blamed for a hostage-robbery of more than $500,000 from an Ulster Bank branch in Strabane.

The robbery Monday came a week after an announcement that Northern Bank, the province’s largest retail bank with 95 branches, was being sold by the National Bank of Australia group to Danske, Denmark’s largest bank. Northern Bank accounts for about 30% of the Northern Ireland banking market.

Britain’s largest heist is believed to be the theft of about $65 million from the Knightsbridge Safe Deposit Center in west London in 1987.

The nation’s most famous holdup was the Great Train Robbery of 1963, in which an armed gang took 2.6 million pounds from a Royal Mail train, a sum equivalent to about $40 million today.