Robbers dug tunnel to bank

2005-08-10 11:40

Sao Paulo - Thieves spent three months tunnelling under a busy city avenue in northeastern Brazil to break into a Central Bank vault and pull off one of the world's biggest heists ever.

The robbery netted 156 million reals ($67.8m)from a vault at the Central Bank in the city of Fortaleza, 2 500km northeast of Sao Paulo, said federal police spokesperson Sabrina Albuquerque by telephone.

The money was discovered missing when it was reopened on Monday after it was closed for the weekend on Friday evening.

The amount taken surpassed the $65m stolen in 1987 from the Knightbridge Safe Deposit Centre in London, previously recognised by experts as the planet's biggest robbery. The Brazil heist, however, was dwarfed by the theft of $900m from the Iraq Central Bank in 2003.

No one has been arrested in the Central Bank robbery, but at least eight suspects have been identified, Albuquerque said.

'Executed by professionals'

In Fortaleza, the thieves took three months to build an 80m long, 70cm high tunnel from a house they had rented near the bank, Albuquerque said. The tunnel was 4m below the floor of the vault and electric lighting, wooden panels and plastic sheets lining the walls.

The thieves had renovated the house and put up a sign indicating it was a landscaping company selling plants and natural and artificial grass, police said.

"I never saw them selling anything and in fact I never saw any plant or grass for sale in that house," said Richard Chamberlain, the owner of a bookstore next to the house rented by the thieves, speaking by telephone.

He said he never heard any noise "indicating that a tunnel was being dug," or noticed anything suspicious.

"The tunnel was dug underneath one of the city's busiest and noisiest avenues, so it would be hard to notice anything unusual," he said.

Inside the rented house, police found a bolt cutter, drill, electric saw and a blowtorch, which were apparently used to cut through the vault's 1.1m-thick steel-reinforced concrete floor.

For James Wygand, a Sao Paulo-based security consultant the robbery "was organised and executed by professionals who knew exactly what they were doing ... this was not the kind of operation put together by a couple of friends over a few beers."

"It will be very difficult for police to trace the stolen bills because they were old and not in neatly sequenced piles," he said. "No one jotted the serial numbers."

- AP