A GANG armed with a pneumatic drill dug a tunnel from a Paris metro station into the basement of a bank on Sunday morning – an attempt at a second heist by so-called “termite robbers” in the French capital in just a week.
The would-be thieves fled without any cash or valuables when they set off alarms at a BNP Paribas branch near Tolbiac metro station. In a scheme bearing uncanny similarities to a successful heist elsewhere in Paris last week, they had attempted to bore into a room containing hundreds of safe deposit boxes by digging through the sewerage system.
The gang was forced to abort the attempt when an alarm alerted police to the break-in at about 4am on Sunday. Digging equipment, including a pneumatic drill, was found at the scene.
“The individuals left the premises before they could reach the safety deposit room of the bank,” Paris police headquarters said in a statement.
Last weekend, a Crédit Lyonnais branch in Paris was broken into by tunnel-digging robbers who cracked almost 200 private safes, according to police, while a branch of Caisse d’Épargne in a Paris suburb was robbed at the new year in similar circumstances.
Police have not confirmed a link between the three incidents.
In last week’s robbery, the gang drilled into the bank from the basement of an adjoining building, tied up a security guard and spent about eight hours in the bank before leaving undetected.
In a country where bank robbers can attain folk-hero status, many commentators compared that daring theft in one of the busiest parts of Paris to the work of Albert Spaggiari.
In 1976, Spaggiari led a gang who broke into a Société Générale branch in Nice after a two-month operation that involved crawling through the sewer system and digging into an underground vault.
They managed to open 400 safe deposit boxes and made away with goods worth some €24 million.
Spaggiari later escaped from captivity and died while on the run.
