Thieves tunnel into Bulgari retailer from Rome sewers and steal £420,000 price of jewels | EUROtoday

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A gang of thieves stole at the least €500,000 (£421,000) price of jewelry and watches from a Bulgari store in Rome earlier than disappearing into the town’s sewers with police in pursuit.

The gang struck at about midnight on Saturday, climbing via a gap they dug within the flooring of the Bulgari retailer on Rome’s Via Condotti, which is lined by high-end designer retailers.

The three masked robbers had been caught on CCTV and triggered the alarm. Police arrived seven minutes after the alarm was sounded, however took 4 minutes to interrupt via the door that had been barricaded by the gang.

But the raiders managed to collect their haul of valuables and disappear again down the outlet into Rome’s sewer system inside these 11 minutes, based on Italian media.

“While we were opening the door, we could hear them shouting ‘Let’s go, let’s go’,” one investigator advised the newspaper The Republic.

Rome’s sewage system dates again to the Roman period, with the advanced community of tunnels in comparison with an underground metro system.

“The centre of Rome is criss-crossed by sewer tunnels that date back to the Roman era and are still in use,” Marco Placidi, head of Sotterranei di Roma, a gaggle that explores Rome’s underground archaeology, advised The Times.

“They are large enough to walk in and, if it’s not raining, there is no more than 10cm of water in them. They are not totally mapped so it is hard to know where the robbers went,” Mr Placidi added.

There was hypothesis that they’d saved the Bulgari retailer underneath surveillance for a while and should effectively have gone into the store, posing as clients, to raised perceive its structure and safety techniques.

In August 2022, the same tunnelling method was utilized by a gang of thieves to attempt to raid a financial institution close to the Vatican – nevertheless it failed after one robber turned caught.

On that event, the thieves dug a tunnel from an deserted store, hoping to entry a financial institution department. One of them, dubbed “the mole man” by the Italian press, turned caught for greater than eight hours when a bit of the tunnel collapsed.

He was finally extricated alive with the assistance of a giant mechanical digger. The different members of the gang tried to flee the realm however had been caught by police.