Armed robbers snatch $50m in uncut
diamonds from Brussels airport. Eight armed robbers disguised as
police officers and brandishing
machine guns have disappeared into
thin air with diamonds worth £32
million after pulling off an audacious
lightening raid at Brussels airport. The heist at Zaventem international
airport on Monday night is one of the
biggest diamond robberies in history
and the highly trained professional
gang took just three minutes to hold
up a Swiss passenger jet before making their escape. Belgian police are baffled after the robbery which took place with
clockwork precision, military timing
and apparent insider knowledge
allowing the gang to target the
delivery of a diamond consignment
within an 11 minute time window. The robbers wearing masks, hooded
police cagoules and armed with
machine guns equipped with laser
sights, struck at 7.47pm local time on
Monday night just before the aircraft
they had targeted was cleared for take-off. The gang's target was a Brink's
diamond and jewellery services truck
that had just finished loading the
8.05pm Helvetic Airways flight
2L789 bound for Zurich. For security
reasons the valuable cargo is loaded on the runway just minutes before the
plane takes off. After cutting through a security
perimeter fence, weakened by
construction work, within several
hundred feet of the Swiss Fokker 100
airliner, the robbers used two black
vehicles, a Mercedes van and Audi A8 car, both equipped with blue flashing
police lights to race across the airport
tarmac. Screeching to a halt alongside the
Brinks van and the passenger jet, four
heavily armed men poured out of each
vehicle and held up the aircraft pilot,
co-pilot and security guards. The robbers then forced the doors of
the cargo bay of the plane and took
out about 120 packages containing
mostly diamonds, which only
represented a portion of a cargo
thought to be worth over £60 million ($100m). After loading the loot, the eight men,
aware that security and police alarms
had been triggered, quickly fled in
their vehicles with flashing police
beacons to throw any hot pursuit off
their trail. The robbers made off at high speed
through the same gap in the security
cordon they had opened in front of
the aircraft on the runway. The raid took place without a shot
being fired and was so quick, around
180 seconds that passengers on board
the plane "saw nothing" and the first
they knew of the heist was when
their flight was cancelled minutes later. One vehicle, the Mercedes van was
later recovered burned out nearby, the
second car and the eight men have
disappeared without trace triggering a
manhunt across Belgium and the
Netherlands. "They wanted to pass themselves off
as cops," said Anja Bijnens, a
spokesman for the Brussels
prosecutor. "This was not a random
robbery. It was well-prepared - these
were professionals." The diamonds are thought to have
been from Antwerp, a major European
trading centre for the gems where
£130 million ($200m) in stones are
traded every day. A decade ago the Belgian city of
Antwerp, the world capital of
diamond-cutting, was the scene of one
of the biggest diamond heists in
history, when robbers took $100
million in gems and uncut stones. "It's one of the biggest robberies we've
seen," said Caroline De Wolf, a
spokesman for the Antwerp World
Diamond Centre. "It would be at about
50 million dollars in rough and
polished diamonds. It is a huge amount." Antwerp's diamond industry carrying
out its own internal investigation
alongside that of the Belgian police
amid concerns over the ease by which
robbers, acting on detailed inside
information, made their raid and escaped. "This is causing quite some unrest,"
said Ms de Wolf. "It was incredible
how easy it all went." Because many of the diamonds are
uncut, the chance of recovering the
stolen gems is "very small". "This is
mainly rough diamonds from Antwerp.
They are not cut and so there is
certainly no certificate. They can just be sold and will soon be gone," said Ms
de Wolf.-www.dailytelegraph.co.uk

Hmmm, just like d movies. So whatz d nxt step??