Thieves used a large drill to break into a safe at a high street bank branch in western Germany and steal an estimated \u20ac30m (\u00a326m; $35m) in cash and valuables, police have said.<\/p>\n
A police spokesman likened the break-in to the Hollywood heist film Ocean’s Eleven, telling AFP news agency it was “very professionally executed”.<\/p>\n
During the heist at Sparkasse savings bank in the city of Gelsenkirchen, thieves broke open more than 3,000 safe deposit boxes containing money, gold and jewellery. <\/p>\n
Gelsenkirchen Police said they became aware of the crime after a fire alarm was set off in the early hours of Monday morning.<\/p>\n
Currently, no arrests have been made and the perpetrators remain at large.<\/p>\n
Police said the thieves had used the “quiet Christmas days” to rob the building on Nienhofstrasse in the Buer district.<\/p>\n
Initial investigations suggest they gained access to the bank, and escaped, via an adjacent parking garage.<\/p>\n
Witnesses have reported seeing several men carrying large bags in the staircase of the garage overnight on Saturday into Sunday. <\/p>\n
Police said video footage shows a black Audi RS 6 leaving the garage, on De-La-Chevallerie-Strasse, early on Monday morning.<\/p>\n
The hole into the underground vault room was discovered when a fire alarm went off in the early hours of Monday, and police and the fire brigade searched the building.<\/p>\n
Affected bank customers have been asked to contact Sparkasse bank, which has set up a hotline. Police secured the entrance of the branch on Tuesday after a large number of customers gathered outside demanding information.<\/p>\n
A message on the bank’s website said the branch would remain closed on Tuesday following the break-in.<\/p>\n
Sparkasse said 95% of customers’ safe deposit boxes had been forced open by the thieves, so the likelihood they were affected is “very high”. <\/p>\n
It added that the contents of each compartment are insured up to \u20ac10,300 and told customers to check if they had additional coverage through their home insurance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thieves used a large drill to break into a safe at a high street bank branch in western…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-218470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}