Robbers Get Away From Bank With 10M Rubles

By Irina Titova

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: July 25, 2012 (Issue # 1719)

Unidentified criminals stole 10 million rubles ($307,000) in cash from a branch of VTB 24 bank on Moskovsky Prospekt on Saturday.

The robbers broke into the bank through a hole they dug through the bank’s floor from the building’s cellar, Fontanka.ru reported.

The culprits worked quickly, apparently realizing that they would have very little time before the alarm system went off. It took the criminals two minutes to open the vault, take the cash and leave before police arrived.

The bank was robbed at about 7 p.m. — immediately after the branch closed. The security police officers who arrived on the scene after the alarm was activated did not notice any sign of a robbery, but were suspicious and called the bank’s office. They then found two of the bank’s female clerks tied up in the room in which the vault was located. There was a hole in the floor through which the robbers had entered.

The intruders included three masked people wearing gloves. Their actions were obviously well coordinated and planned in advance: It was clear that they had studied the layout of the building beforehand. The building was constructed in the 1970s and the concrete floor that the criminals dug through was about 20 centimeters thick. The police estimated that it would have taken at least four or five hours to break through the floor from the cellar, even with the use of power tools. It is likely that preparation work was carried out on Thursday night and Friday morning, Fontanka reported.

The criminals’ knowledge of the premises was also visible in the fact that they didn’t dig their hole right under the vault, whose walls are enforced and equipped with alarm sensors. Instead, the robbers entered through a hole made under the hall where financial operations are conducted and where the two female employees were at the time of the break-in. The women told police that the robbers acted like lightning: They broke through the floor, three people jumped through the hole and they handcuffed the women without pushing them around or shouting. When the alarm system sounded, the robbers realized they had no more than two-and-a-half minutes before the police arrived.

The security police officers arrived at the scene within two minutes. Two armed officers entered the building while one stayed outside. During that time, the robbers were leaving through the cellar.

Igor Paradeyev, head of the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast criminal department, said the criminals had obviously trained for their robbery in another place, Fontanka reported.

St. Petersburg police spokesman Vyacheslav Stepchenko told The St. Petersburg Times on Tuesday that the investigation into the robbery was ongoing. He did not comment on how the criminals had accessed the bank’s safe.

Bank clients will not be affected as a result of the robbery, VTB 24’s press service said, Fontanka reported.

Items were not stolen from client safety deposit boxes, only from the bank’s vault, and the money was insured, the bank said. VTB 24 said the most important thing for the company was that none of the bank’s employees were harmed during the attack.