Scotland Yard apprehend jewel thieves - including three pensioners - who pulled off diamond heist
With meticulous planning and remarkable good fortune, the thieves who broke into a safe deposit vault in London's diamond district seemed to have pulled off the perfect jewel heist. But their luck ran out on Tuesday when more than 200 Scotland Yard officers closed in on them.
The nine arrests were a triumph for detectives whose early work had been criticised because of an embarrassing failure to respond to a midnight alarm at the start of a holiday weekend.
That gave the thieves more than 48 hours to carefully remove the contents of the safe used by jewellers in the famous Hatton Garden district.
The suspects, all Britons, were questioned in a London police station after coordinated morning raids in northern London and the southeastern county of Kent, Scotland Yard said. Three of the men were pensioners, aged 67, 74 and 76; the youngest was 43.
Scotland Yard said bags containing a significant amount of high-value property were recovered at one of the addresses but did not assign a value to the heist.
British media had speculated it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The audacious robbery over the Easter weekend fascinated Britain. Dressed in fluorescent vests and hard hats, the thieves entered the high-security vault area in the London diamond district, carrying bags and wheeled rubbish bins they used for carrying off the booty.
To gain entry, they climbed down an elevator shaft and drilled through two-metre thick concrete walls, later making off with the contents of 72 safety deposit boxes.
Commander Peter Spindler on Tuesday defended the police performance in the face of the earlier criticism.
"At times we've been portrayed as if we have acted like Keystone Cops but I want to reassure you that in the finest traditions of Scotland Yard, these detectives have done their utmost to bring justice to the victims of this callous crime," he said.
Nonetheless, police took the unusual step of apologising for mishandling the initial alarm.
"Our call-handling system and procedures for working with the alarm-monitoring companies were not followed," they said. "Our normal procedures would have resulted in police attending the scene, and we apologise that this did not happen."
They asked victims to be patient while police sort out the recovered valuables in order to return them to their owners.
