A British newspaper posted a 17-minute video of last weekend’s potentially record-setting theft of safe deposit boxes in London’s Hatton Garden jewelry district—which shows the crooks were bold enough to enter the premises twice over the weekend.
Closed-circuit TV footage posted by Britain’s Mirror shows that members of the six-man crew wore dust masks and hard hats. One appears to have red hair, a second had a shaved head and possibly an earring; a third sported gray hair; a fourth wore a shirt emblazoned with “Montana.” They left carrying their haul in waste containers.
In a statement, Paul Johnson, Detective Chief Inspector for London’s Metropolitan Police, which released stills from the video, called the suspects “highly audacious, entering the safe deposit box-packed vault on two occasions over the weekend.” They first entered April 2 at 9:19 p.m. and left the following morning at 8:12 a.m. They returned on April 4 at 10:17 p.m. and left the following morning at 6:44 a.m.
Courtesy Metropolitan Police
Stills from closed-captioned video of the robbery
According to the Mirror, six men executed the break-in on April 2. Just three men returned on April 4 and fled in a white van.
The police said the crooks emptied out 72 boxes out of a total 999 in Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd., located in the basement of EC1 Greville Street. (Seven were already empty, police said.) The building showed no signs of forced entry: The crooks came in through a side entrance, disabled the elevator, and then slid down the shaft. After forcing open the basement doors, they used a heavy-duty drill to bore holes in the vault’s 6-foot-5-inch-thick reinforced concrete walls.
The statement said that officers have successfully made contact with 42 box owners.
According to the BBC, police were notified on April 3 that a vault alarm had gone off but chose not to inspect it further.
While the crooks had removed most of the CCTV cameras in the building, the existence of this footage show the crooks “may have made a mistake” in not taking them all, a source tells the Mirror.
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