FIR of eight-hour Sakhi Hassan bank heist registered

A day after a group of robbers broke open three-and-a-half dozen lockers at a branch of a private bank in the Sakhi Hassan neighbourhood of Karachi during an eight-hour-long heist, police registered an FIR against unidentified suspects on Monday.

The case was registered on the complaint of the bank’s manager, Danish, at the Taimuria police station. The complainant said he received information of the robbery at 6am on Sunday.

He said he found the lockers open when he reached the bank and also found the security guard, Inam, bound with a rope. The guard told the manager that he had returned to the bank at 9:30pm on Saturday after his dinner.

According to the bank security guard’s statement to the police, the security guards of the security company had arrived at the branch twice during the robbery but done nothing. The suspects had used a white car in the robbery. The investigators are trying to get CCTV camera footage from the vicinity of the bank to trace and arrest them.

Police said 42 bank lockers had been broken open, adding that they had not been insured. They said the DVR system of the branch was not linked to the central office, adding that they would have easily obtained the suspects’ footage if the system had been connected to the head office.

Officials had said a day earlier that a group of four suspects broke into the bank, took its security guard hostage at gunpoint, bound him up with a rope and then broke open the lockers inside.

They said the robbers got into the bank at 9pm on Saturday and stayed inside until 5am on Sunday, at which point they made off with valuables worth millions of rupees. Police said they had detained two bank guards to help the investigation, as they believed a friend of one of the guards to be involved in the robbery.

Officials said Inam the guard told them that he and his friend had left for dinner on Saturday night, and that on his return to the bank, he found four men there. He said he was held hostage at gunpoint and taken into the bank.

Police said the security alarm had rung during the breaking of the lockers, but the staff of the security company visited the bank only on the outside and returned.