Man, 27, held over Antwerp bank raid as details emerge of thieves making off hastily after alarm sounded

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Burglars who broke into a bank in Antwerp’s diamond quarter by crawling through tunnels and a sewage pipe left gold bars strewn across the floor of the main vault after apparently being disturbed during the raid.

They also left behind vital clues including a mattress, extension cables, pneumatic hammers and a grinding wheel that has been traced through its serial number to a shop in the Netherlands.

The men are believed to have been disturbed by the building’s alarm but escaped while the police waited for employees to open the secure door to the vault.

Once inside, the officers were unable to enter the escape tunnel until breathing equipment was brought in.

The public prosecutor has confirmed that a 27-year-old man, who was born in Georgia but has Belgian nationality, was arrested on Tuesday and is due to appear before judges on Friday in relation to the burglary of the BNP Paribas Fortis branch on Sunday.

Sahil Malik, the lawyer for the suspect, declined to comment apart from saying: “We will do our story Friday in front of the council chamber.”

The thieves are understood to have started out in a nearby flat from where they dug a four-metre (13ft) long tunnel nearly two metres below the surface to connect with a sewage pipe.

Burglars use sewage pipes to break into Antwerp bank Read more

They then crawled for hundreds of metres in the sewage works before tunnelling again to resurface in the bank.

CCTV images appear to show that the raid involved three men, who left the bank with heavily stuffed black bags on their backs.

But it appears that they were disturbed by a burglar alarm in the vaults. Only 20 to 30 of more than a thousand safety deposit boxes held by the bank had been emptied by the time police arrived to find bars of gold left on the vault’s floor.

The gang, two of whom were said to have spoken in broken English, had leased the basement flat from where they dug their first tunnel under the name Mark Buchman. Police found a pile of bags of sand in the bedroom.

The bank is on the edge of a square mile that is the largest diamond district in the world, boasting an annual turnover of £42bn. It was the scene of the “heist of the century” in 2003, when more than £75m in jewels was stolen from a vault.