A GANG of professional criminals from Dublin and Northern Ireland is believed to be behind the robbery of computer equipment worth £500,000 from a north Co Dublin warehouse on Tuesday night.
The same gang also may have been behind the armed hijacking of a lorry in the same area in July last year in which computer equipment worth several hundred thousand pounds was stolen.
The equipment taken in the raid on Irish Express Cargo warehouse in Swords on Tuesday night and the equipment stolen from the lorry in Swords last year are virtually identical.
The items taken on Tuesday night were Western Digital disk drives. The July robbery involved the theft of Quantum disk drives.
Gardai are also examining links with other computer equipment thefts in the past two years in Dublin, Kildare, and Limerick.
Three members of the gang, armed and wearing masks, overpowered three security guards in the warehouse at 9.40 p.m. on Tuesday night.
Other gang members then arrived in a navy blue truck with a shutter door on the right hand side.
They loaded a number of plates containing the boxed disk drives into the truck and drove off at around 11.45 pm. They also took two cars belonging to the security men and these were found early yesterday abandoned in the Swords area.
Gardai were still looking for the robbers' truck yesterday. The Garda investigation involves local officers and detectives from the newly formed National Bureau of Crime Investigation, based in Harcourt Square, Dublin.
. The latest robbery of computer components is the most recent in a series over the past two years.
Disc drives were stolen last July, when £2 million worth of merchandise was taken from a lorry near Dublin Airport.
In Augusta 1995, almost £500,000 worth of Intel computer chips were stolen from the Irish Express Cargo warehouse near Dublin Airport.
Some days later, 10 boxes of memory chips, also valued at around £500,000, were stolen from the Gateway factory at the Clonshaugh Industrial Estate. In November 1995, a raid was carried out on AST's plant in the Plassey Technology Park in Limerick, where £250,000 worth of memory chips were taken.