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Diamonds stolen in armed raid at Brussels airport 'Gigantic' diamond heist at Brussels airport
(35 minutes later)
Armed robbers stole diamonds worth £300m while the gems were being loaded on to a plane at Brussels airport on Monday evening, the Belgian state broadcaster VRT reported. Police are looking for eight men who made a hole in a security fence at Brussels international airport, drove on to the tarmac and stole diamonds worth tens of millions of pounds from the hold of a Switzerland-bound plane.
Four armed men in two vehicles drove up to a security van near a Swiss passenger plane, officials said. The armed and masked men used two vehicles in their raid on Monday evening and within minutes made their way to the plane, took the cache of gems and drove off into the darkness, said the Brussels prosecutor.
"The men were armed and masked. There were no shots fired and nobody was injured," a spokeswoman for the Brussels prosecutor said. Police found a burnt-out vehicle close to the airport on Monday night but said they were still looking for clues.
Both vehicles sped off after the robbery and one of them was later found, said officials, who would not comment on what was taken. The heist is estimated at some £30m ($50m) in diamonds, said Caroline De Wolf of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre.
The robbers managed to get on to the tarmac after breaking through the fence that surrounds the airport, a spokesman for Brussels airport said. "What we are talking about is obviously a gigantic sum," De Wolf told Belgian state broadcaster VRT.
An airport spokesperson said the robbers made a hole in the perimeter fence, and drove right up to the Swiss passenger plane, which was ready to leave. The robbers got out of the car, flashed their weapons and took the loot from the hold, said spokesman Jan Van Der Crujsse. Without firing a shot they drove off through the same hole in the fence, completing the theft within minutes, he said.
Van Der Crujsse could not explain how the area could be so vulnerable to theft. "We abide by the most stringent rules," he said.
The Swiss flight, operated by Helvetic Airways, was cancelled after the robbery. The insurance for air transport, handled sometimes by airlines themselves or external insurance companies, is usually relatively cheap because it's considered to be the safest way of transporting small high-value items, logistics experts say.