You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!
‘Italian Job’ thieves blast cash machine to smithereens
PERHAPS they’d just never seen the film.
Or if they had watched The Italian Job, the thieves who tried to break into this cash machine yesterday had clearly forgotten Michael Caine’s famous words.
Rather than simply blowing off the doors, their explosion catapulted the ATM kiosk 30ft, uprooted trees and rocked nearby houses.
The blast in Darlington at 1.20am flattened road signs and could be felt two miles away.
Dawn Dinsley, who lives a few streets away from the Matalan shop where the Co-operative Bank cashpoint stood, said: ‘The whole of this side of Darlington literally shook. The house shook and I woke up to what sounded like a sonic boom. It was clear from looking at the scene that this wasn’t an impulsive thing, it had been thought out.
‘If any of the shrapnel flew out it could have killed anyone walking past or living in the houses opposite.’
Police said they thought the thieves had got away with ‘a quan- tity of cash’ after the blast, which sent anti-ram raid bollards flying across the car park.
Neighbour Harry Chown, 28, said he was woken up by a ‘violent explosion which shook my house’.
The civil servant said: ‘It looks like the thieves have gone overkill on explosives while they were trying to blow open a standalone ATM. It’s been obliterated and it flattened trees and signs and scattered debris everywhere.
‘It had shades of The Italian Job, it looks to me as though they have gone way over the top with the amount of explosives they’ve used, any cash would have been obliterated in a blast of that size.’
Inspector Chris Knox, of Dur- ham Constabulary, said: ‘The cash machine has been targeted using an explosive substance to gain entry.
‘It’s caused significant damage around the area. We believe a quantity of cash has been taken from the machine.
‘However we can’t confirm this at this current time.’