An audacious and accurately planned heist of Hatton Garden Depository shocked Britain being the biggest in UK history. The vault is located in London’s Holborn jewellery famous due to a large concentration of jewellery traders and stores. During four-day Easter holiday weekend a group of 7 robbers was penetrating concrete walls of the depository with the industrial Hilti DD350 drill they previously stole from equipment store. After robbers got into the building elevator shaft and started to drill their way into the vault it took them only two and half days to get into the depository.
According to The Times “panicked diamond dealers and gold traders feared that the culprits had cracked into as many as 300 secure vaults used to store millions of pounds worth of stock”. However thieves had their time to empty only 72 safety deposit boxes filled with watches, diamonds and jewellery. The total estimates of the items stolen totals £200 million (CAD 370 million) worth of gold, diamonds and jewellery. According to the Guardian one of the jewellers was worried about possible loss of £50,000 of uninsured jewellery and other valuables.
While this unprecedented heist were in motion the alarm system of the depository did not properly send the signal to the police department. When the police received the alarm signal it was classified as one where “no police interference required” and no units were dispatched to the scene for investigation. However, the good news are that robbers had left and exceptionally “chaotic” crime scene full with clues that are currently analyzed by experts and criminalists. Also, security cameras captured some footage of hair colour and partially exposed face of certain thieves. That should give some clues and a starting point in investigation of this strident heist.
Many owners of the deposit boxes who stored their valuables were saying that the depository was “the safest place around” and people are “extremely shocked” right now realizing that a place with this level of security can be cleared by a team of an old-school thieves. Latest news around the investigation are saying that the Hatton Garden heist may be organized and executed by the same team who cracked Volksbank vault in Berlin in January 2013.