Families of bank staff are increasing target for raiders

ANALYSIS: The robbery of €7.6m raises fears of copycat raids, with families of bank staff put in danger

WHEN THE dust has settled following yesterday’s robbery of the Bank of Ireland on College Green in Dublin city centre, one question will remain: how was young bank worker Shane Travers able to access €7.6 million in cash and drive away without the bank’s security procedures swinging into action?

Travers, a 24-year-old son of a garda originally from north Co Dublin, works in the Bank of Ireland vaults storage facility on College Green. The normal working day there begins very early so Travers’s arrival time at 7am was not out of the ordinary.

The vaults where the estimated €7.6 million was taken from were opened yesterday morning to prepare money for collection by cash-in-transit vans for delivery to ATMs and bank branches around the country. The vaults were not specifically opened for Travers to take what was effectively ransom money needed to free his girlfriend, Stephanie Smith, her mother, Joan, and five-year-old nephew. They were being held by an armed gang in Co Meath.

There were at least two other men at the storage facility when Travers took the money. Travers is believed to have told these people the situation he was in. He put the money into four laundry bags given to him by the gang. He carried the bags himself to his car and drove off at 7.15am.

It was more than 10 minutes before a designated person appointed by the bank to alert gardaí to major robberies made a call to the Garda.

Protocols agreed between the Garda and banks state that in kidnap situations like yesterday’s, gardaí should be informed a robbery is taking place before any money is taken from a bank.

This did not happen yesterday. In the 10 minutes-plus between the money being driven from the bank and gardaí being notified, Travers would have been almost at Clontarf Dart station, less than two miles from College Green, to hand over the cash to the raiders.

Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern said yesterday if the protocols had been followed gardaí could have put a rapid reaction operation in place.

“Unfortunately the bird had flown by the time gardaí were involved,” he said.

But even if the bank had contacted gardaí before Travers left the branch, gardaí would have had one major factor to deal with.

When Travers left College Green with the money, he still did not know where he was to drop it off for collection by the gang. So his colleagues would have been of no assistance to gardaí in that regard. Travers had been given a mobile phone by the gang and was informed via that phone, only after he left College Green, of the exact drop-off point for the cash.

In the 1980s banks were plagued with in-branch armed hold-ups and introduced safety mechanisms to deter them. Criminals then began robbing money at gunpoint when it was being delivered by cash-in-transit vans to ATMs.

But after a sharp rise in such attacks in 2005 and 2006, the cash-in-transit companies put measures in place to make money harder to access in their vans. They also fitted dye boxes, which explode ink over money if a storage box is forced open.

Now the gangs have moved on again and are targeting bank workers by kidnapping their loved ones. Such raids are sometimes called “tiger robberies” because of the similarity between the gangs’ modus operandi and the way tigers stalk their prey.

The fear for gardaí is that given the success of yesterday’s raid, copycat attacks will follow.