04 January 2011

Wasn't this a movie already?


The AP has an article at the Guardian about a bank robbery in Buenos Aires:
Thieves dug a hundred-foot-long (30 metre) tunnel from a neighbouring building into an Argentinian bank and emptied the contents of up to 140 safety deposit boxes. Authorities said three thieves entered a Banco Provincia branch in the Buenos Aires district of Belgrano on New Year's Eve when it was closed and spent the weekend opening and emptying between 130 and 140 of the branch's 1,408 boxes. The robbery wasn't discovered until the bank reopened on Monday.
Bank executives didn't say how much the thieves got away with, because clients are not obliged to tell authorities what was in their safety deposit boxes. The thieves rented a building next to the bank in June and spent months digging the tunnel, which emerged in an area where safety deposit boxes are located, prosecutor Martin Niklison said. The tunnel had lights, ventilation and reinforcement. "It was a really impressive job," Niklison said, adding that officials had not ruled out that the thieves had an accomplice on the bank's staff. Anti-seismic alarms sounded at various times but police couldn't get into the bank to find out the reason why, the prosecutor said.
Hundreds of bank clients gathered in front of the state bank yesterday to demand the withdrawal of their savings and blocked a nearby street to protest the slow pace at which authorities were confirming whose boxes had been robbed.
"The message we want to give [clients] is that we are going to protect their interests after this incident," a Banco Provincia vice-president, Gustavo Marangoni, told TV channel C5N.
Many Argentinians began putting their savings in bank safety deposit boxes instead of bank accounts following the country's 2001 financial crisis, when many depositors lost savings.
In 2008, Jason Staham starred in The Bank Job, with the same MO. In the Top Ten Robberies list, the 'break into the bank and get the safe deposit boxes' figures in two of the ten.

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