Irish police have arrested seven people in connection with a spectacular hostage-taking and 7 million euro (US$8.8 million) bank robbery, a spokesman said on Saturday.
Six men and a woman were detained as elite Garda officers and detectives intercepted cars and swooped on a home in late-night raids across Dublin.
Reports in Ireland said the Garda, or police, made their move after identifying a known criminal gang as the prime suspects for the theft from the Bank of Ireland’s landmark branch in the center of the capital.
“Yesterday night after 11pm, seven people were arrested, six men and a woman,” a Garda spokesman said.
“A house was searched … in Phibsboro in Dublin. Two cars were seized and a substantial quantity of cash was found,” he said.
Police sources said several million euros of the haul had been recovered.
The drama started when armed men forced their way into a house near Dublin where two women and a six-year-old boy were kidnapped at gunpoint and tied up.
One of the women, Stephanie Smith, is the girlfriend of bank employee Shane Travers, 24, who is the son of a policeman.
He was forced to fill laundry bags full of bank notes from safes in the bank’s vaults as Smith, her mother and the boy were held hostage, reports said.
Travers was then ordered to take the money to a station in north Dublin, close to where his father is stationed, the Irish Times newspaper said.
The two women and the boy had been bundled into the back of a van and taken to a disused house.
They managed to free themselves after Travers had delivered the money to the station.
So much money was stored at the bank at College Green because it is a collection point for cash delivery vans.
The vaults were opened as normal at 7am when Travers arrived, the report said.
But the fact that such a junior bank employee had access to such large amounts of cash has raised questions.
Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern has called emergency talks with banking officials to review security procedures.
“I would be less than frank if I didn’t say that there are issues of concern in relation to how this happened and how this was allowed to happen,” Ahern said.
In Ireland’s biggest hostage bank raid, an Irish Republican Army gang was blamed for the robbery of £26.5 million (US$38 million) in Belfast in 2004.
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