Robbers snatch £32m of diamonds in audacious heist
A gang of armed robbers posing as police pull off one of the biggest airport heists in history after grabbing diamonds worth £32m in Brussels.
The men cut a hole in a security fence at Brussels international airport and drove on to a runway where a Brink’s vehicle was loading the gems on to a Swiss passenger plane.
The Belgian authorities said two black cars with blue lights on top, each containing four men, drove onto the tarmac.
They threatened the plane’s crew with guns before forcing open the plane’s cargo hold and making off with the loot within minutes, escaping through the same hole in the perimeter fence.
No shots were fired but one source suggested that either a pilot or driver was held at gunpoint during the robbery, which took place shortly before 8pm on Monday.
The men wore balaclavas and clothes resembling police uniforms, and were armed with machine guns, Belgian police said.
A vehicle which may have been used in the heist was found gutted by fire in nearby Zellik. A second vehicle has not yet been traced.
Airport spokesman Jan Van Der Crujsse said: “Threatening to use their weapons, the robbers made off with several goods stowed in the plane’s loading area.
“The whole incident only took a few minutes. No shots were fired. Nobody was injured.”
He said he could not explain how the area could be so vulnerable to theft, saying: “We abide by the most stringent rules.”
The Swiss flight, bound for Zurich and operated by Helvetic Airways, was cancelled. Swiss, an affiliate of the German airline Lufthansa, declined to comment on the heist while the investigation was ongoing.
Insurance premiums for air transport are usually relatively cheap because it is considered to be the safest way of transporting high-value cargo.
Gigantic sum
Early reports put the value of the diamond at hundreds of millions, but Caroline De Wolf of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre put the value at about £32m, which she described as “a gigantic sum”.
The stolen diamonds originated in Antwerp, where 80 per cent of the world’s uncut diamonds are traded.
A haul of that size would make this robbery the largest jewel heists in Europe for years, and one of the biggest airport robberies in criminal history.
The infamous Lufthansa heist, as immortalised in the film Goodfellas, saw mafia robbers swipe cash and jewels worth around £13m in today’s prices from New York’s JFK airport in 1978. The crime is still the biggest cash robbery ever to take place on US soil.
In 1983 six robbers broke into a warehouse belonging to former Brink’s joint venture Brink’s-MAT at Heathrow Airport.
The size of the haul – three tonnes of gold bullion – surprised the gang and led to a bloody trail of underworld murders dubbed the “curse of Brink’s Mat”.
Masked gunmen struck at Heathrow again in 2004, stealing £1.75m in cash from the Menzies World Cargo warehouse at the airport.
In 2010 four men were jailed for a total of 64 years over the robbery after the first English court case for more than 350 years to be heard without a jury. The court of appeal ruled that the case should be heard by a judge alone because of the danger of jurors being intimidated.
A raid on Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in 2005 in which more than £80m worth of gems, mainly uncut diamonds, were taken is thought to be both the biggest airport heist and the biggest diamond robbery ever.