Gardaí and bankers to discuss kidnap procedures

Senior gardaí will meet management from the country’s financial institutions today to assess ’tiger’ kidnapping procedures and protocols.

As detectives continue to quiz seven people over the €7.5m ’tiger’ kidnap raid for a third day, current rules laid out by banks will be studied and reviewed.

It is understood any gaps identified in protocols will be tightened to ensure another robbery like Friday’s multi-million euro heist from the Bank of Ireland in central Dublin can not happen again.

Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, who has been in contact with Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy over the weekend, raised serious concerns that protocols were not followed.

He maintains the procedures are in place to protect bank employees from ’tiger’ kidnapping – so named because the kidnappers stalk their victims.

Meanwhile officers are still searching for €3.5m still missing from the bank robbery, the largest ever carried out in the country.

A north Dublin criminal gang is said to be responsible for the raid in which junior bank worker Shane Travers was forced to empty the city centre vault while his girlfriend Stephanie Smith, her mother Joan, and Joan’s six-year-old grandson were held hostage at gunpoint.

Their ordeal began on Thursday night after six armed men forced their way in to Mrs Smith’s rural Co Kildare home while her husband was away.

Gardaí were not alerted about the robbery – similar to that carried out at the Northern Bank in Belfast when £26.5m (€30m) was taken in a pre-Christmas raid in December 2004 – until Mr Travers had left the bank with four laundry bags full of new notes at 7.15am on Friday morning.

Minutes later the money was handed over at a north Dublin train station.

But by Friday night investigators had recovered around €4m of the stolen cash when one man arrested after gardaí chased a car along the M50 motorway around Dublin.

Five other men and one woman were later arrested.

The seven, aged from their early 20s to late 30s, are being held at Blanchardstown, Bridewell, Finglas, Mountjoy and Pearse Street stations.