Over the quiet Easter break, a diamond heist worthy of an exciting movie, was carried out in the diamond centre of London’s Hatton Garden.
The vault at The Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd building with millions of dollars in diamonds was broken into with heavy cutting equipment after the thieves tunnelled their way through a wall accessing a lift shaft and rappelling down to the basement vault. An estimate 370 million dollars’ worth of diamonds was removed at their leisure over four days.
This area of London carries the biggest concentration of diamonds in the UK and is a prime target for enterprising thieves.
Police are investigating although it is unlikely any or most of the diamonds will be recovered.
It is though that a hugh fire last week in London may have something to do with the heist.
According to John O’Connor, Former head of The Flying Squad said, “… he believed the blaze in Holborn may have been started by the same gang that raided Hatton Garden Safety Deposit Ltd’s basement vault, just over half a mile away, over the Easter weekend.
He suggested that the power outage would have made the vault easier to access.
He told LBC radio: “(The police) may be connecting it to the underground fire at Holborn station which disabled all the electricity in that area for a period of time. I think that probably was deliberate. “I’ve never heard of an outage of electricity like that causing a fire that lasted as long as that. That seems to me as too much of a coincidence.” He suggested the power outage may have assisted in the heist.
Of course this is not the first diamond heist in the diamond district of London. In 1987 60 million dollars’ worth of diamonds was stolen.
Sources:The Guardian
Diamond World
