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Burglars steal bank's 1-ton safe
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[July 03, 2007]
VAN BUREN, Ark
(AP) -- FBI agents worked Monday to identify burglars who burst through a bank's wall and then made off with the bank's one-ton safe. A gaping hole in the rear wall of the First Community Bank was reported at about 8 a.m. Sunday, police said. Investigators and a bank security expert said the bank's safe was missing when they entered the building Sunday morning.
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"You don't see this every day," said Steve Frazier, spokesman for the FBI in Little Rock.
The burglars apparently stole a forklift from a construction site near the bank, then used it to hoist the safe out of the bank. Police aren't sure yet if the burglars used the forklift to ram into the bank, creating a hole, or if they used another vehicle or method to get in.
"I could say without a shadow of a doubt that whoever is responsible for this had (either) put forth a great deal of effort of planning and surveillance or was loosely associated with the bank," Detective Keith Lindley of the Van Buren Police Department said.
After creating a hole in the building, the burglars then disabled a bank's security camera by pulling out its wire and pointing the bank's other cameras away from the safe, Lindley said.
The burglars then drove the forklift through the hole in the wall and took the safe, Lindley said. Authorities believe the burglars may have loaded the safe into a pickup that was parked at a nearby church, where the forklift was abandoned.
"It had to have been a minimum of two (suspects)," Lindley said. "My gut feeling is three or four based on everything I've seen and the level of sophistication."
Frazier said agents were gathering information on who might have carried out the heist.
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 "We are in the process of trying to determine who did it," Frazier said. "We're not ready to release any names or identities."
"We will locate them, we will arrest them and then they will be prosecuted," Frazier said.
Investigators plan to check the surveillance videos of neighboring businesses to see if any of the burglary was recorded, Lindley said.
While the method was unusual, Frazier said investigators have looked into numerous types of robberies.
"There have been physical intrusions into banks before," Frazier said.
In 2004, an unusual attempt at theft from a bank in Searcy led to the capture of a pair suspected in numerous bank jobs. Police discovered a fake night deposit box that had been built onto the side of a Searcy bank branch so it could collect night receipts dropped by restaurants and other businesses. Similar fake boxes had turned up earlier in Eureka Springs, Fort Smith, Hot Springs, and Little Rock. The two men eventually arrested were accused of performing similar trickery in six other states.
[Associated Press] |
