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Thieves drill into bank vault and steal €30m in Christmas raid - THE TELEGRAPH
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A gang of robbers pulled off a Christmas heist in Germany when they drilled through the wall of a bank vault and escaped with loot worth tens of millions of euros.
The thieves, taking advantage of the festive shutdown, used industrial drilling equipment to cut a near-perfect circle through the reinforced wall of a Sparkasse branch in Gelsenkirchen on Saturday.
Investigators believe the gang spent much of the weekend inside the vault without detection, breaking into the boxes and ferrying away its contents.
The burglars used professional equipment to pull off the elaborate heist - Jam Press/Polizei Gelsenkirchen
They broke open 3,000 safety deposit boxes, stealing money, gold and jewellery worth an estimated €30m (£26m) and fled without being detected, police said.
A police spokesman told AFP that the break-in was “indeed very professionally executed”, likening it to the heist movie Ocean’s Eleven.
“A great deal of prior knowledge and/or a great deal of criminal energy must have been involved to plan and carry this out,” he said.
Alarms raised, then ignored
Officers were alerted while the raid was still under way after dust from the drilling triggered a fire alarm. But after inspecting the premises, they found no signs of a break-in and left. The failure is now the subject of an internal police review.
Officers said the burglary was discovered only in the early hours of Monday, when a second fire alarm sounded shortly before 4am. A full search of the building then revealed a large hole leading from the basement into the vault.
“You can’t buy that drill at a hardware store,” said a police spokesman.
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Witnesses have since come forward to report seeing several men carrying large bags in the stairwell of a neighbouring multi-storey car park on Saturday night.
After a review of CCTV footage, police revealed that a black Audi had left the car park in the early hours of Monday morning, with masked occupants inside. Investigators said the car was fitted with number plates stolen in Hanover earlier.
Police are still investigating what items were stolen from the deposit boxes. Around 3,300 boxes were stored in the vault, and 90 per cent were broken into, officers said.
The boxes had an insurance value up to €10,300, and police therefore estimated the damage at some €30m.
Several victims had told police officers that their losses far exceeded the insured value of their safe deposit boxes.
Sparkasse bank told its customers: “The likelihood that your box has been affected is very high. Unfortunately, you must assume that your box has been broken into.”
After news of the heist emerged, customers gathered outside the closed branch, demanding access to their lockers. Police were forced to clear the foyer as tensions rose, local media reported.
A wider problem
Germany has witnessed several spectacular heists in recent years. In 2019, thieves broke into the Green Vault museum in Dresden and stole Saxony’s crown jewels, a haul estimated at more than €100m.
The previous year, burglars made off with a giant gold coin bearing the image of Queen Elizabeth II from a Berlin museum. Both crimes were later linked to Germany’s powerful Arab crime syndicates.
The Ruhr region, in which Gelsenkirchen is located, has also been repeatedly targeted by Dutch gangs specialising in hit-and-run ATM raids, smashing cash machines before fleeing across the border.
Earlier this year, Dutch police arrested 18 suspects in connection with those raids.
