Two robbers who wore burkas and threatened staff at a Phones 4 U store with a meat cleaver have been jailed.

Mohammed Sabek, 27, and Aneel Khan, 28, thrust the meat cleaver towards a sales assistant and demanded the keys to the store room of the shop in Putney High Street, south west London, on October 2, 2012.

Kingston Crown Court heard the men forced the assistant, a customer and store manager into a locked cage area in the basement before tying them up.

Sabek and Khan, who are both former Phones 4 U employees, then loaded more than £40,000 worth of phones, tablets, accessories and cash into suitcases.

They told one of the victims to give a false statement to the police and took his ID card, before fleeing the store in a taxi to Hounslow.

No-one was injured during the robbery.

Police from Wandsworth CID established an earlier attempt to rob the same store had been planned two days before.

Sabek and Khan decided to not go through with it and were caught on CCTV inside a coffee shop without the burkas to disguise them. They were both arrested on February 19 and were sentenced today following a trial at Kingston Crown Court.

Sabek, of Grosvenor Road, Chiswick, was jailed for five years while Khan, of Great Woodcote Park, Purley, was given the same sentence.

Detective Constable John Baldwin, from Wandsworth CID, said: “Both Sabek and Khan are now facing a long jail sentence because they thought by wearing clothing to conceal their face and body they could commit crime and not be caught.

“What both of them failed to realise is that the Met will use specialist teams and equipment to catch and prosecute those responsible for such acts.

“I hope that these sentences serve as a reminder to anybody thinking of committing serious crimes, that sooner or later they will be serving a lengthy custodial sentence.”

* An earlier version of this article erroneously identified Mr Aneel Khan of Gloucester Road, Kingston upon Thames, as one of the two persons convicted of an armed robbery on Putney High Street. Although one of the persons convicted of this offence is named Aneel Khan (and is the man pictured above), he is not the Aneel Khan who lives in Gloucester Road, Kingston upon Thames. We apologise to Mr Khan for this error, which originated from a Metropolitan Police press release which contained the same mistake.