FRANCE’S PANTHEON of audacious bank-robbers has acquired its newest members after a gang tunnelled its way into the vault of a bank in central Paris and cracked open almost 200 safe deposit boxes.
A group of up to five thieves dug through the basement of a building adjoining the Crédit Lyonnais branch on Avenue de l’Opéra on Saturday night before tying up a security guard and helping themselves to the contents of the underground vault, police said.
They spent about eight hours in the bank and managed to open nearly 200 safes before setting the vault on fire as they left at about 7am on Sunday. French radio station RTL reported the wall as being over 2½ft thick.
The value of the stolen goods was difficult to estimate, police said, as the safes belonged to individual customers and were never opened by staff.
The branch had been closed for renovations for a number of weeks, and customers who turned up yesterday were irate that there was nobody to tell them whether their safes had been rifled.
Police said their investigation was hindered by damage caused to the vault by fire and water sprinklers, which meant that forensic specialists could not access the room for 24 hours after the incident.
In a country where bank robbers commonly gain folk-hero status, many commentators were comparing the weekend’s daring theft in one of the busiest parts of Paris to the work of Albert Spaggiari, whose most famous heist this one closely resembled.
In 1976, Spaggiari led a gang who broke into a Société Générale branch in Nice after a two-month operation that involved crawling through the sewer system and digging into an underground vault.
They managed to open 400 safe deposit boxes and made away with goods worth some €24 million, leaving a message on the walls that read: “without hatred, without violence and without weapons”. Spaggiari later escaped from captivity and died while on the run.
More recently, a French security van driver became an unlikely internet star last year after allegedly driving off with more than €11 million from a bank in Lyon. Police suspect the driver made off in his armoured van while his colleagues were inside the bank on a routine stop-off.
They initially feared he had been taken hostage, but soon found that the driver had cleared his fridge, emptied his flat of papers and withdrawn all the money from his bank accounts.
His audacity in striking against the banks was celebrated on dozens of Facebook pages, while websites began selling a range of T-shirts, mugs and badges in tribute to what one site called “the heist of the century”.
The suspect was arrested in Monaco several weeks after the robbery.