£60m hole in the wall
First pictures inside vault reveal how gang forced their way in
DRILLED with precision, this is the hole made by the gang behind the Hatton Garden raid to carry out their audacious heist.
The robbers cut through a 20in thick concrete wall to get into the vault holding the safety deposit boxes they plundered.
The dramatic image of the hole is one of a series of photographs released yesterday by police as they try to track down the gang, who escaped with gems, cash and valuables estimated at £60million.
The photographs also show personal safety deposit boxes, smashed open and discarded, and left in a 4ft pile.
Shiny silver metal doors containing boxes untouched and still locked can be clearly seen behind the debris, a possible indication that the gang knew which boxes to target at Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd in London’s jewellery quarter. The pictures show both the chaos in the vault – with doors removed from their hinges, twisted metal bars, discarded drills, and electrical cables straddling the floor – and the cool expertise of the robbers who worked meticulously underground for two nights over the Easter weekend.
A former Flying Squad detective said: ‘Everything you see indicates a very specialist knowledge both in what was inside the building and how to deal with it. There is a expertise, combined with strength, patience, determination and, probably, an inside knowledge.’
Police released CCTV footage showing that the raiders spent two nights drilling through the reinforced concrete wall to get into the vault. The hole – three distinct bores created using a specialist diamond-tipped Hilti drill – became their ‘gateway’. It is beside the untouched alarmed, reinforced metal door with at least two combination locks. The hole is only 10in high and 18in wide. Police say it is too small for an average man to have squeezed through – and too small for the men seen on CCTV footage to have used.
But they are sure that at least one person clambered through the hole into the vault and then passed the booty back through it. The director of the safety deposit company admits he suspects an ‘inside job’.
Detectives said there was no sign of forced entry to the outside of the premises. The robbers are suspected of having been let into the building through a side door.
Police say they disabled the communal lift on the second floor and then used the shaft to climb down into the basement.
They forced open shutter doors into the basement. The images show a security shutter outside the lift was prised up by the gang and metal bars on a door leading to the vault was also forced open. Once inside the vault’s exterior room the gang – believed to have been four to six strong – began the painstaking task of drilling through the wall. An angle grinder, crowbars and drills were among the items left behind when the gang escaped in a Ford Transit van with the contents of 72 of the 999 safety deposit boxes.
The photographs also underline the striking similarities between the London heist and a raid two years ago on the Volksbank in Berlin where gold, silver and diamonds worth £8.3million were stolen from 294 security boxes.
The pictures will be shown with an appeal for information on the BBC’s Crimewatch tonight.