Scotland Yard detectives have admitted that they had failed to respond to an intruder alarm that sounded at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company over the Easter weekend. Their incompetency caused Britain’s biggest burglary in which thieves took away £200 million of jewellery from London’s diamond district in an operation that lasted more than 48 hours. The gang behind the Hatton Garden heist returned for a “second dip” to break into the vault because police failed to respond to the alarm going off after midnight on Good Friday.
A security firm, Southern Monitoring Alarm Company, reported the alert but it was graded by Scotland Yard as “no police response required” without investigating whether the thieves were inside or not. An apology was made for the failure to respond to the burglar alarm on Good Friday which was triggered after the robbers had been inside the building for three hours.
“Our normal procedures would have resulted in police attending the scene and we apologise that this did not happen. In this case, the owners had been notified by the alarm company and a security guard attended the building but saw nothing more than our officers would have done had they been deployed,” Commander Peter Spindler said.
The burglars first entered at about 9.20 pm on April 2 and stayed until 8.05 am the next morning. An alarm went off at 12.21 am on April 3. The gang returned to the vault on April 4 at about 10.17 pm and stayed until 6.30 am the next morning. Police were alerted about the heist just after 8 am on April 7.
On April 22, the police released pictures of the inside of the vault showing damage caused by the burglary, and how the burglars had used holes drilled through the vault’s wall to bypass the main vault door. A total of 72 of the 600 boxes in the vault were opened.
10 people have so far been arrested in a series of raids. Former bank robber Noel Razor Smith, 54, has analysed the CCTV footages and believes the gang was made up of foreign nationals most likely eastern Europeans and Israelis, who had never met but were together for this one job.
“They will have clean records in the UK and be paid a salary during the planning so they don’t commit any other crimes. They will have been put up in luxury while they planned this, all with false identities, telling each other nothing about who they are or where they are from. They have no attachments to each other or the job. On this evidence, the job was pretty watertight. It could have taken up to two years to plan something like this. In my opinion they’ll disappear never to be seen again,” he feels.
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Awesome, steal from give to poor!
Come on anon….. Another story full of crap it’s been well known everyone arrested is a British citizen so why publish the Eastern European ball shite?