Taipei police yesterday said they had caught three suspects in the hunt for the perpetrators of a car theft-hijack that occurred at the Taipei 101 mall on Wednesday last week.
Police said that after watching video footage of more than 3,000 cars around the mall on that day, they identified a red Honda sedan that the thieves drove into the mall's parking garage before they committed the crime.
Police said they identified a 33-year-old suspect via the red Honda and arrested a man surnamed Chang early on Monday morning in Taoyuan County.
The other two suspects were caught later in Taipei County.
The three had admitted to committing the crime, police said.
The crime took place on Wednesday afternoon when the wife of an optometrist, surnamed Lu (呂), and her friend, surnamed Lee (李), had finished dining at a restaurant in the mall and went to retrieve their car from the mall's basement parking garage.
Three people in masks suddenly appeared holding guns and threatened them, ordering the two women to hand over their cash, totaling about NT$240,000, as well as any other valuables.
Lu and Lee were blindfolded and forced into the back of Lu's BMW. The thieves then drove the two women to a remote location in Shenkeng Township (深坑).
After dropping the women off separately, the three made off in the BMW with the cash.
The case follows a separate theft at the same mall last month, when a thief made off with millions of NT dollars in diamonds from a DeBeers store by pretending to be a Japanese tourist who needed help shopping for his sister's wedding gift.
The recent crimes led to questions of whether security is too lax at the upscale mall. The management responded by announcing plans to improve security and surveillance.
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