Belfast bank robbery will go down in history as one of the biggest raids

THE plundering of almost €30m from the headquarters of the Northern Bank in Belfast will go down as one of the biggest heists in history, joining the Brinks Mat and Great Train Robbery in the annals of record-breaking crimes.

In August 1963 the Great Train Robbers’ haul was £2,631,784 in bank notes - worth about €57.7m today.

The money was on a train en route from Glasgow to London when it was ambushed.

Train driver Jack Mills was badly injured and gang members were later rounded up and sent to jail for up to 30 years each.

Two decades later, on November 26, 1983, a gang stole 6,800 bars of gold from the Brinks Mat high security bullion warehouse near Heathrow Airport.

The €37.5m raid was carried out by six armed men posing as security guards. They escaped with three tonnes of gold after dousing a guard with petrol and threatening to set him alight if he did not open the vault.

Most of the bullion was never recovered.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world’s biggest bank robbery took place during civil disorder in Beirut, Lebanon, in January 1976.

Guerrillas blasted open the vaults of the British Bank of the Middle East in Bab Idriss and cleared out safe deposit boxes full of cash, gold, stock certificates and jewellery. The haul was valued at up to €31m at 1976 prices.

Another raid in Britain is also estimated to have netted €43m in July 1987. A gang cleared the contents of a safe deposit centre opposite Harrods in London.

All these crimes were dwarfed, though, by the greatest robbery on record. It was also from a bank and happened during April and May 1945 as Germany collapsed at the end of the World War II. The amount of gold looted from Germany’s Reichsbank at that time was estimated at €3.6 billion at 1984 prices.

Another monumental bank raid is alleged to have happened in the hours before bombs began falling on Baghdad last year.

Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay, since killed in a gun battle with US forces, is said to have personally removed €894m in cash from Iraq’s Central Bank. The dollar and euro bills were said to have been loaded on to three tractor-trailers.

In the US, a security van driver stole €19.6m in unmarked notes in March 1997. The current record for a jewel haul, as recorded by the Guinness Book of Records, stands at €43m. Three men, firing blanks from machine guns, burst into the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, France, in August 1994 and robbed the hotel’s exclusive store.

The world record for a mugging happened on the streets of London and stands at €421m.

On May 2, 1990, John Goddard was doing his daily courier round from Sheppard’s money brokers when he was held at knifepoint and his briefcase, containing almost 300 bearer bonds, was taken. Within hours every major bank had been warned not to accept the certificates.