Highly organized thieves wearing monkey and clown masks tunneled into a company that transports money for banks, surprised workers counting cash and made off with 4.7 million reals (US$1.6 million), police said Wednesday.
At least eight men broke through a bathroom of Nordeste Transbank Seguranca e Transporte de Valores Monday night after digging a 120m tunnel from a nearby house, said Naif Saadi, police chief for the district where the crime occurred.
Wielding AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, the thieves forced about 75 workers tallying cash for automatic teller machines to stuff the money in bags and fled back through the tunnel after spending only 10 minutes inside the building, Saadi said.
Police were trying to determine whether the thieves may have had help from someone working at the company because they managed to tunnel exactly where they wanted to arrive in the building, Saadi said. The bathroom for the room where the cash counters work had no alarm system to detect an intrusion.
"They certainly had information about how this company worked, and mapped the end of the tunnel with exact precision," Saadi said.
The company has a fleet of more than 500 armored cars and is a division of one of Brazil's biggest security companies.
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