‘IRA gang prepared to kill Northern Bank heist hostages’
The 35-year-old man, who was detained in the city yesterday morning, is the 12th person to be arrested in connection with the raid over the past month.
One person has since been charged with carrying out the massive theft, while another two were charged with less serious offences.
A 24-year-old Northern Bank employee who was held hostage by the raiders also remains in police custody following his arrest last week.
Meanwhile, PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde has claimed that the IRA gang which carried out the robbery was ready to murder its hostages.
He also insisted, in a new book out yesterday, that the heist last December was sanctioned by the provisionals’ leadership.
BBC Northern Ireland security editor Brian Rowan included an intelligence assessment that suggests at least four of the organisation’s active service units were involved in the raid.
The job was run by the IRA’s most senior operational managers, including its chief of staff and its Belfast-based director of intelligence, he was told.
“The officer who gave this assessment named both men,” Mr Rowan said.
“He was clearly confirming that this was a job that had come out of the IRA’s top drawer - that it had the sanction of the leadership.”
Millions of pounds seized during raids in Cork in February as part of the investigation were still in bundles of used £20 notes, an intelligence officer told him.
“All the Ulster Bank (notes) were together, all the Bank of Ireland... Now the things that were stolen out of the Northern Bank were actually already made up into those bundles,” the intelligence officer said.
“All they did was re-package them.”
The book focuses on how close Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists came to striking a power-sharing deal with their sworn enemies in Sinn Féin.
Although the robbery at the Northern Bank’s Belfast HQ just before Christmas shattered confidence and wrecked attempts to revive the Stormont Assembly, the book also focuses on the IRA’s decision this year to call off its campaign and disarm.
But Mr Orde gave a grim assessment of the lengths the raiders were ready to go to after taking over two households, one in west Belfast and the other in Loughinisland, Co Down, and ordering bank employees to help clear the vaults while their families were held at gunpoint.
“This was being seen as a great success within certain republican circles, and what was being forgotten was that there were some real victims in this,” he told Mr Rowan.
“People could have died. If people hadn’t complied they’d have happily killed them. This is what PIRA do.
“So, it was a particularly brutal and vicious robbery... This was a crime at the top end of violence.
“People will not recover from this. It was that brutal.”
