BRAZIL: The Brazilian authorities have launched a nationwide hunt for a gang of thieves who executed the biggest bank raid in the country's history, stealing around 156 million reals (€54.5 million) from a branch of the Central Bank in the north-eastern city of Fortaleza.
Details were emerging yesterday of a meticulously planned robbery in which gang members spent three months burrowing under the bank building before pulling off the daring raid.
According to Fortaleza's civil police, the thieves rented a small house one block from the bank where they set up a fake gardening business, Grama Sintetica (Astro Turf), as a front for their activities.
The robbery was planned in painstaking detail. The building's front was painted green, while gang members began advertising the company's services to neighbours. So as not to arouse suspicion they even purchased a white van, left outside the house on Rua 25 de Marco, with a logo of the "gardening business" painted on its side.
At the same time construction began on an 80m (87.5 yards) tunnel, which ran from a bedroom at the rear of the house, three metres below the regional stock exchange and into the vaults of the central bank. Electric lights were used to illuminate the 70cm-wide (27.5 inches) passage, which was reinforced with pieces of wood and plastic.
A tube attached to an air conditioning unit was used for ventilation, as the criminals crept towards the deposit's 2m-thick concrete floor undetected.
It was only on Monday at about 8am that the robbery was noticed. Bank employees found a circular hole in the floor of the building's safe and cans of energy drinks and cartons of fruit juice scattered on the floor.
The branch was closed over the weekend and police said motion sensors and security cameras in the vault had not been working at the time.
The thieves made off with at least four containers holding used 50 real (€17.50c) notes, police said, adding that this would make it more difficult to track down the money.
"It's something completely unprecedented both in Fortaleza and Brazil," said Fabrina Albuquerque, a representative of the city's civil police, which is investigating the raid. "Digging a tunnel like this is something you would expect to see in the cinema.
"They've been planning this for a long time, evidently."
Yesterday investigators found kneepads and gloves in the garden of the house, apparently used during the excavation.
Ms Albuquerque said a team of 23 police agents were investigating the crime in Fortaleza, a seaside city known normally for the pristine beaches that stretch along its coastline. "We can't say yet whether the gang was from [ the state of] Ceara or not, or how many gang members there were," she said.
A receptionist at a hotel next to the house told reporters she had seen at least eight men in the area. According to an employee from a local restaurant, one of the men, who went by the name of Paulo, said he was from Niteroi in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
The biggest bank raid in history happened in Nazi Germany in April 1945 when gold worth an estimated £2.5 billion (€3.6 billion) was looted from the vaults of the Reichsbank in Berlin. The biggest post-war cash heist before the Brazilian theft was from a bank in Lebanon in 1976 when $50 million €40.45 million) in cash and deposit-box valuables was stolen.
The Central Bank has begun an internal investigation to find out why cameras and motion detectors in the vault did not function and whether the thieves had inside help. - (Guardian service)