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= Securitas depot robbery =
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Introduction
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The 2006 Securitas depot robbery in Tonbridge, England, was the UK's
largest cash heist. It began with a kidnapping on the evening of 21
February 2006 and ended in the early hours of 22 February, when seven
criminals stole almost . The gang left behind another £154million
because they did not have the means to transport it.
After doing surveillance and placing an insider at the Securitas
depot, the gang abducted the manager and his family. The same night,
they tricked their way inside the building, and tied up 14 workers at
gunpoint. The criminals stole £52,996,760 in used and unused sterling
banknotes, the property of the Bank of England. Most of the getaway
vehicles were found in the following week, one containing £1.3million
in stolen currency. In raids by Kent Police, £9million was recovered
in Welling and £8million in Southborough. By 2007, 36 people had been
arrested in relation to the crime.
At trial at the Old Bailey in London in 2007, five people were
convicted, and received long sentences, including the inside man, Emir
Hysenaj. A woman who had made prosthetic disguises for the gang gave
evidence in return for the charges against her being dropped. Lee
Murray, the alleged mastermind, had fled to Morocco with his friend
and accomplice Paul Allen. He successfully fought extradition to the
UK and was imprisoned there for the robbery. Allen was extradited and
after a second trial in 2008 was jailed in the UK; upon his release he
was shot and injured in 2019. By 2016, £32million remained
unrecovered, and several suspects were still at large. In February
2026 chief constable Tim Smith of Kent Police made a fresh appeal to
recover the £32 million.
Depot
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The Bank of England prints pound sterling (£) banknotes in Debden,
Epping Forest. In 2006 it was outsourcing the distribution of currency
to five companies, Group 4 Securicor, Halifax Bank of Scotland, Post
Office Ltd, Royal Bank of Scotland and Securitas. There were 28
centres across England and Wales holding new currency and which stored
used currency as it was returned, either to be redistributed or
destroyed. Until 2001, Barclays had stored its own supplies of cash;
it had built the depot at Medway House, Vale Road, Tonbridge, in Kent,
in 1980, choosing the location because it was close to three police
stations that were always open (at Royal Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks
and Tonbridge itself). Medway House was just 330 yd away from the
Tonbridge station and was also near the Angel shopping centre. The
first building on Vale Road was a Kwik Fit garage and the second was
the depot.
Barclays outsourced the distribution of money to Securitas Cash
Management (a subsidiary of Securitas) in 2001, and by 2006 Securitas
was running the Tonbridge depot. It operated non-stop with 80
full-time staff split across three shifts; most of the work was
sorting and counting banknotes which arrived by armoured transport and
were sent out again to restock cash machines. The cash was bundled
into bricks, which were wrapped in differently coloured plastic
according to denomination: £5 bricks were green (£2,500); £10 bricks
were blue (£5,000); £20 bricks were red (£5,000); £50 bricks were
yellow (£12,500).
The manager of the depot was Colin Dixon. He lived in Herne Bay with
his wife and their young child. Owing to the nature of his job, he had
been trained not to tell his colleagues where he lived and to drive to
work every day using a different route. The family owned two cars, and
he would alternate which car he used. He had been told that if he was
ever stopped by the police when driving that he should stay in his car
and give the officers a piece of paper describing his job, then follow
them to the nearest station, where he would co-operate with their
enquiries.
Conspiracy
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A criminal gang began to study the depot with the intention of robbing
it. Men later convicted of conspiracy included Paul Allen, Jetmir
Buçpapa, Roger Coutts, Emir Hysenaj, Lee Murray, Stuart Royle, and Lea
Rusha. Albanians Buçpapa and Hysenaj were childhood friends who met at
school in Bajram Curri. They did not mention this in court, claiming
not to know each other at all. Lea Rusha, a roofer and cage fighter,
met Buçpapa (a bouncer) at a mixed martial arts (MMA) training session
run by Rusha at the Angel Centre, near the depot. Rusha also knew Lee
Murray through MMA; Murray was stopped by Kent Police on 28 July 2005
while in his car on a road overlooking the depot, together with two
unidentified men. As well as being a cage fighter, Murray was also a
drug dealer.
Hysenaj signed up with a recruitment agency which supplied workers to
Medway House. He was first given a job at Royal Victoria Place
shopping centre in Royal Tunbridge Wells, and then at the end of 2005
offered work at the depot. At his training he asked questions about
security measures and passed the information to Buçpapa, who told
Rusha. On 6 January 2006, mobile phone records displayed at trial
indicated that Allen, Coutts, Murray, Royle and Rusha were present at
a meeting at Royle's house. Murray visited a surveillance shop in
Derbyshire to buy a spy camera and recording device, with the
intention of giving it to Hysenaj. Despite warning by the shop owner
to be careful not to get glue on the lens of the camera when placing
it in position, someone from the gang did precisely that, so Murray
sent his friends Allen and Keyinde "Kane" Patterson back to the shop
to get it replaced. The shop owner fixed the camera and attached it to
a belt, which Hysenaj used to film inside the depot. On their way
back, the men were stopped by Nottinghamshire Police for driving at
115 mph. Allen had broken the speed limit while driving on an expired
provisional licence, and was in a car he did not own which had no MOT
and no insurance, so it was impounded by the police.
Several days before the robbery, Murray went clubbing in London and
crashed his yellow Ferrari 360 Modena sports car on the New Kent Road
the next morning. Murray fled the scene and was arrested by four
police officers nearby. He was charged with assault in a case that
never came to trial. When he had abandoned his car he left behind two
burner phones containing numbers of other gang members and three
photographs from the club, which showed him associating with Allen and
Patterson. The police later recovered these items from the impounded
car. Murray had accidentally recorded himself on one of the phones,
talking to Rusha about how to carry out the robbery.
Robbery
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In the early evening of Tuesday, 21 February 2006, Dixon was driving
home along the A249 when he was pulled over just outside Stockbury, a
village northeast of Maidstone, by what he presumed was an unmarked
police car. The Volvo S60 had flashing blue lights in its grille and
one of the two uniformed officers came to Dixon's window, asking him
to turn off his engine and leave the keys in the ignition. Breaching
protocol, Dixon followed the officer's order to step out of his car
and to sit in the other car, where he was handcuffed. His car was
moved off the road and the Volvo travelled west on the M20 motorway to
the West Malling bypass. The criminals play-acted driving him to a
police station before revealing their deception and threatening him
with a gun at Mereworth. He was tied up and transferred into a white
van which drove to Elderden Farm near Staplehurst.
The two men impersonating police officers next drove to Dixon's home
in Herne Bay and spoke to Lynn Dixon, telling her that her husband had
crashed his car and that she and her son should accompany them to the
hospital as quickly as possible. When she got into the car Lynn Dixon
realised it was not a real police car and the men told her she was
being abducted; they took her to the farm as well. Colin Dixon was
then interrogated about the layout of the depot and warned at gunpoint
that the lives of his family members depended upon his actions.
Around 01:00 on Wednesday, 22 February 2006, three vehicles headed to
the depot. Lynn Dixon and her son were held in the back of a 7.5 tonne
white Renault Midlum lorry; Colin Dixon and the other gang members
travelled in a Vauxhall Vectra and the Volvo. The vehicles split up,
and the Volvo arrived at the depot at 01:21. Dixon and a gang member
dressed as a police officer got out of the car and walked towards the
pedestrian entrance. Dixon rang the bell and looked through the window
at the control room operator. Instead of querying why Dixon was
returning at night or why he was with an officer, the inexperienced
operator opened the door and let the two men through the airlock into
the building. The entire robbery was filmed on the building's CCTV and
when Kent Police later reviewed the footage, they nicknamed this gang
member "Policeman". "Policeman" subdued the operator and, without
being asked, Dixon pressed the button which opened the gate and
allowed the vehicles to enter the yard.
The rest of the gang now entered the building. One man was later
nicknamed "Stopwatch", because he was wearing a stopwatch to time the
robbery in an echo of the film 'Ocean's Eleven'. Others were called
"Shorty", "Hoodie" and "Mr Average". The criminals' faces were hidden
by balaclavas and they were armed with handguns, shotguns, AK-47
assault rifles and a Škorpion submachine gun. Dixon urged staff to
comply with the gang's commands, and 14 workers were tied up. Nobody
pressed an alarm. The seven members of the gang attempted to load
metal cages full of banknotes into the lorry and found they were too
heavy, so one criminal tried to drive the Lansing Linde power lifter
and the rest shoved the hostages out of the way. It was difficult to
manoeuvre the lifter and a Securitas worker was ordered to drive it;
when he kept deliberately crashing it, Dixon was told to use a pallet
mover. The worker then wedged the power lifter between the tail lift
of the truck and the loading bay, rendering it useless. When Dixon
pumped the pallet mover up, "Hoodie" became suspicious and pointed a
gun at his head; frustrated by the slow progress, the other gang
members grabbed bundles of money in their hands and filled up shopping
trolleys. The criminals stole £52,996,760 in used and unused
banknotes; another £154million would not fit in the lorry and they had
to leave it behind. In total they took seventeen cages and three
trolleys full of banknotes.
The staff workers were left locked up inside empty cages, as were Lynn
Dixon and her son. No alarm had been set off and the gang ordered the
staff to stay still when they left at 02:44. At 03:15, when they were
sure the robbers had gone, the staff triggered an alarm which called
the police. The police arrived and began the investigation by
interviewing the staff and taking their clothes and their DNA
profiles.
Investigation and arrests
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The following day (Thursday, 23 February 2006) Securitas and their
insurers offered a reward of £2million for any information about the
heist, which Crimestoppers stated was the largest reward ever offered
in the UK. Securitas gave the Bank of England £25million as an initial
reimbursement. Kent Police said the heist had been meticulously
planned by organised crime and that at least £20million had been
stolen, possibly as much as £50million. By the evening of 23 February,
two arrests had been made in South London: a man aged 29 and a woman
aged 31 were detained at separate houses on suspicion of conspiracy to
commit robbery. A third person, a 41-year-old woman, was arrested at a
branch of the Portman Building Society in Bromley on suspicion of
handling stolen goods. This woman was innocent and she told 'The
Guardian' she was planning to sue the police on account of "the most
distressing experience of my life". As news of the robbery reached the
newspapers, Hysenaj was told he had the day off work and went to see
the Levellers at the Assembly Hall Theatre in Royal Tunbridge Wells
with his girlfriend.
The same day, police discovered some of the vehicles implicated in the
robbery: a former Parcelforce van had been left at the Hook and
Hatchet pub in Hucking, near Maidstone; a Volvo and a Vauxhall Vectra
had been abandoned near Leeds Castle; Dixon's Nissan Almera was
located at the Cock Horse pub in Detling. The next day, Friday 24
February, discarded metal cages and other paraphernalia from the crime
scene were found at Friningham Farm near Detling, on land rented by a
friend of the owner of Elderden Farm.
A white Ford Transit van owned by a friend of Buçpapa and Rusha was
reported to be in the car park of the Ashford International Hotel.
When the police checked the van, they found a balaclava, a bulletproof
vest and the Škorpion submachine gun. Two bags were opened which
contained over £1.3million in stolen banknotes. On Saturday, 25
February 2006, armed police officers raided the homes of Buçpapa and
Rusha, encountering Buçpapa's wife at their house on Hadlow Road in
Tonbridge. At Rusha's house in Lambersart Close in Southborough,
police found surveillance footage of Dixon's home, weapons and plans
of the depot. In the shed they discovered balaclavas, Royal Mail
clothing and a radio scanner tuned to a frequency used by the
emergency services. On Sunday afternoon, Kent Police arrested Stuart
Royle and another man in Tankerton, between Whitstable and Herne Bay,
after shooting out a tyre of the BMW car he was driving. On Monday,
police arrested Buçpapa and Rusha in Deptford, London, after shooting
out the tyres of their car. The following day, the white 7.5 tonne
lorry which had transported the loot was located at a hire centre and
Elderden Farm was searched. At the farm £30,000 in stolen notes was
found in the boot of a car and £105,600 hidden under a dead tree in
the orchard.
Four days after the heist, Murray and Allen fled the UK. After
visiting Amsterdam, they travelled to Morocco, where they spent money
extravagantly on houses, jewellery and narcotics. Back in the UK,
police officers raided a unit on the Graves Industrial Estate in
Welling on 2 March. They broke open a shipping container, finding an
estimated £7million in cash, which was later announced to be
£9,655,040. They also found £50,000 in a bin bag elsewhere. The
discoveries were connected to Roger Coutts, a van dealer who rented
the yard and kept his boat there. The same day as the find, three
people appeared at Maidstone Magistrates' Court: the owner of the farm
was charged with conspiracy to commit robbery, handling stolen goods,
and three charges of kidnapping; Royle was charged with conspiracy to
commit robbery; a third person was charged with handling stolen goods.
All three were remanded in custody. Royle had hired the Renault lorry
used in the heist in his own name.
Buçpapa and Rusha appeared in court on 3 March, each facing the same
charge of conspiracy to commit robbery. They were remanded in custody
until a preliminary hearing at Maidstone Crown Court on 13 March. By 3
March, the number of people arrested had grown to fourteen. Two days
later, the police discovered a hoard of £8,601,990 in a lock-up garage
in Southborough near to Rusha's home. The money was stuffed into
eighteen laundry bags and suitcases. The garage was rented by a man
who sublet it to Rusha's cousin, who was supposed to pay £10 rent
every week but was two weeks behind.
In June a businessman named Ian Bowrem was arrested as he drove around
the M25 motorway. In his Mercedes-Benz, the police found almost
£1million, of which £380,000 was made up of £50 notes from the
robbery. Bowrem refused to say who had given him the money and was
eventually sentenced to three years and nine months in prison. Police
believed he was carrying out Missing Trader Intra-Community (MTIC)
fraud to launder the stolen money. Also in June, Allen and Murray were
two out of four men arrested in Morocco's capital Rabat after a
three-month investigation. They were charged with possession of drugs,
false imprisonment and assaulting the police. In England another man
had been arrested as part of the police investigation and was released
without having been charged; he then fled to Northern Cyprus in
December 2006. By the year's end, Kent Police had recovered £21million
and had asked the Home Office for at least £6million to cover both
investigating the case and future spending on trial preparations. By
2007, 36 people had been arrested.
Trials
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The trial of eight people, including Jetmir Buçpapa, Roger Coutts,
Emir Hysenaj, Stuart Royle and Lea Rusha, began on 26 June 2007 at the
Old Bailey in London. These five men were all charged with conspiracy
to rob, conspiracy to kidnap and conspiracy to possess firearms. The
prosecution was led by Sir John Nutting and the High Court judge was
Mr Justice David Penry-Davey.
The role of manager Colin Dixon was examined, the defence barristers
highlighting "co-incidences" in his conduct which might be interpreted
as suggesting he was the inside man. It was noted that he had breached
regulations in several ways: he possessed two keys for the vault, when
he was supposed to only have one; he had taken photographs of the
depot and its workers, which were found on his computer at home; he
had told CCTV engineers to postpone a visit; he had waited thirty
minutes before raising the alarm after the robbers had departed,
despite knowing that if they had left there was no way for them to get
back inside. It then emerged that the inside man had actually been
Emir Hysenaj. Buçpapa had called Hysenaj at 02:38 as the gang left the
depot; Hysenaj had not picked up but the police could show the mobile
phone records to prove the call had been made.
During the trial, a woman who had made prosthetic disguises for the
gang decided to turn Queen's evidence in return for her charges being
dropped. On 28 January 2008, the jury returned guilty verdicts for
Buçpapa, Coutts, Hysenaj, Royle and Rusha. Buçpapa, Coutts, Royle and
Rusha were given life sentences with an order to serve a minimum of
fifteen years. The next day, Emir Hysenaj was sentenced to twenty
years in prison with an order that he serve a minimum of ten. The
judge also recommended that both the Albanian men be deported after
they had served their sentences. The owner of the farm and another man
were each acquitted. The second man had been paid £6,000 in stolen
notes to make signs on the side of one of the vans used in the heist,
but had not been involved in planning the crime.
At the beginning of the second trial in October 2008, presided over
again by Penry-Davey, prosecutors dropped charges against the
girlfriends of Buçpapa, Royle and Rusha. Paul Allen (who had been
extradited from Morocco) and another man were charged with conspiracy
to rob, conspiracy to kidnap and conspiracy to possess firearms. Allen
was held on remand in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh and driven
to court escorted by a police helicopter which cost £30,000 a day. A
court order made during the first trial to preserve Lee Murray's
anonymity was lifted and he was named as the leader of the gang. In
January 2009 the jury were unable to reach agreement on whether Allen
was guilty or not and found the other man not guilty. A retrial was
ordered for Allen in September and he was held on remand until then.
At the ensuing trial, Allen pleaded guilty to the three charges of
conspiracy which he had previously denied, admitting his involvement
but denying both that he had handled firearms and that he had been one
of the seven men who went inside the depot. He received a sentence of
eighteen years' imprisonment and served six. The 1,063 days spent on
remand were taken off the sentence.
In June 2009 Murray was confirmed to have Moroccan nationality and
therefore he won his fight against extradition from Morocco to the UK.
He remained in prison in Salé and one year later stood trial for the
robbery. He was convicted and jailed for ten years; when he appealed
the length of this sentence, it was raised to 25 years. Kent Police
Detective Superintendent Mick Judge said "I'm pleased Murray will now
begin serving a significant prison sentence for his part in the
Tonbridge robbery." Murray was claimed by other gang members to have
been the leader. The police believed he had worn a disguise when
taking Dixon hostage, and that he was the person dubbed "Stopwatch"
caught on CCTV directing the robbers to move as quickly as possible at
the depot. The other man who had abducted Dixon was believed to be
Rusha wearing a fake ginger beard.
Later events
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Securitas stopped the handling of cash and sold the Tonbridge depot to
Vaultex, a company run by Barclays and HSBC. Howard Sounes published a
book about the crime in 2009, entitled 'Heist: The True Story of the
World's Biggest Cash Robbery'. A decade after the robbery, in 2016,
£32million had still not been recovered. In the opinion of a former
detective superintendent, the cash would have quickly been absorbed
into organised crime networks. Farmers who lived near the robbed depot
reported harassment from criminals convinced that some of the money
was buried on their land. Several people escaped capture and were
suspected by police to be living off the proceeds of the crime in the
West Indies and Northern Cyprus.
In February 2013 Malcolm Constable, who was believed by his brother
Derek to be associated with the robbery, was found dead of a
self-inflicted shotgun wound in Canterbury. Kent Police stated they
had no record of any incidents involving Constable. Paul Allen was
severely injured on 11 July 2019 when he was shot at a home in north
London; he was taken to hospital in a critical condition. He survived,
but was reported to be paralysed below the upper chest and as of 2025
uses a wheelchair. By February 2021, eight men had been arrested in
connection with the attack. In 2025, three men were convicted of
conspiracy to murder in relation to Allen's shooting.
In 2016 an appeal by Jetmir Buçpapa to serve the rest of his sentence
in Albania was rejected by the Secretary of State for Justice. The
following year on judicial review the decision was found to be
irrational. Buçpapa was released from HM Prison Belmarsh in 2020 and
deported to Albania. On New Year's Day 2022, he married for a second
time, in his home town of Tropoja. A four-part television documentary
about Lee Murray called 'Catching Lightning' was released in 2023.
Similar incidents
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Other Securitas depots had been previously targeted in the mid-1990s,
when ram-raiders in Liverpool and Manchester had stolen more than
£2million. The City bonds robbery of 2 May 1990 was a heist in which
£291.9 million (equivalent to £291.9M in ) worth of bearer bonds was
stolen from a monney courier on his way to the Bank of England, one of
the largest heists in world history. The Northern Bank robbery in
Belfast was a cash theft in 2004 in which £26.5M was stolen
(equivalent to £26.5M in ), at the time the biggest cash theft in UK
history. This record was broken by the Tonbridge heist. The largest
cash heist in global history took place in March 2003, when almost £M
(equivalent to £0.695B in ) was stolen from the Central Bank of Iraq,
shortly after the United States began the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
See also
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*List of bank robbers and robberies
*List of heists in the United Kingdom
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