Family held hostage during robbery

GARDAÍ have launched an intensive hunt for the armed gang who kidnapped the family of a security firm worker and robbed a van making a delivery of cash to a Dublin city centre bank.

This latest robbery, in which a family were terrorised by armed criminals, took place at about 6.30am when a number of armed men forced their way into a family home off Bath Avenue in Irishtown where the employee of a security company, his mother and niece, were held hostage.

Sometime later, the man’s mother and his niece were taken from the house and held, under threat, at some secret location for six hours while the robbery got under way. The man was instructed to go the Bank of Ireland in O’Connell Street at around 11.30am where a cash-in-transit van operated by Brinks Allied, his employer, was making a delivery. He was ordered to drive to Drumcondra where he had to leave the money, believed to be around €100,000, in a white Renault van which he left in a hotel car park.

The mother and niece were later freed unharmed in the New Vale Crescent estate in Shankill, south Co Dublin, around 12.30pm and the worker went to Bray Garda Station around an hour and a half later.

The hostages were said to have been severely traumatised by the incident.

Investigators from Donnybrook are heading up the hunt for the gang, led by Superintendent Finbarr O’Brien and helped by members of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Garda Technical Bureau.

Gardaí have asked anyone who saw anything suspicious to contact them.

Following a string of kidnappings of bank officials late last year Justice Minister Dermot Ahern met with bank chiefs and raised concerns about the quantities of money stored in vulnerable branches. Banks were also ordered to look into tightening rules on staff access to large sums of cash to further combat similar raids.

The meeting between the minister and bank bosses was held in the wake of a failed tiger kidnap robbery early in November when armed raiders broke into the home of former Kilkenny star Adrian Ronan before dawn, taking his wife and young children hostage and ordering him to the Bank of Ireland in the city where he was working.

The raiders later aborted their robbery plan and fled the scene leaving the Ronan family badly traumatised.