Police in Britain have arrested seven suspects in the audacious raid on safety deposit boxes inside London’s jewelry district. The vault held many safe deposit boxes belonging to Jewish people.
Detectives hunting the gang behind the Hatton Garden safety deposit raid made the arrests on Tuesday morning.
The contents of 56 safe deposit boxes were taken during the raid in London’s jewellery district over Easter weekend.
Twelve addresses in the London and Kent area were raided by police on Tuesday morning.
Seven men were arrested – aged between 48 and 75 – and a number of high-value items were recovered, police said. Searches of the houses are ongoing.
In response to questions about why police did not respond to an alarm which went off at the premises, Det Supt Turner, said: “We are now in a position to confirm that on this occasion our call handling system and procedures for working with the alarm monitoring companies were not followed.
“Our normal procedures would have resulted in police attending the scene and we apologise that this did not happen.”
Thieves used heavy cutting equipment to break into a vault at Hatton Garden Safety Deposit Ltd, where they ransacked about 70 boxes.
More than 200 officers were involved in the raids which came after a six-week hunt by the Met’s Flying Squad.
(Source: BBC)