HEWITT.MOBI
Home
Sunday, February 26, 2006
The Sunday Times February 26, 2006
The worst night of our lives, by family hijacked in £50m heist
Maurice Chittenden and David Leppard
The security manager who was abducted with his wife and young son in Britain’s biggest cash robbery hit out angrily yesterday at the gang of criminals who kidnapped them. As police made two arrests, Colin Dixon, 51, described the ordeal as the “worst night of our lives” and asked: “How dare they do this to a little boy?”
Colin & Lynn Dixon on their wedding day (BBC)Dixon was hijacked on his way home from work at the Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent. His wife Lynn, 45, and eight-year-old son Craig, were abducted after bogus police officers called at the family’s home in the seaside town of Herne Bay and told them he had been badly injured in a a car crash.
All three were taken to the depot where the gang used threats against them to force staff inside to open up. They stole an estimated £50m, some £24m of it belonging to the Bank of England. Yesterday a statement from Dixon was read out as police announced that they had arrested two men, aged 55 and 33, in the Maidstone area on suspicion of conspiracy to commit robbery.
Dixon said: “It was simply the worst night of my life. But worse than that: it was the worst night in the lives of my wife Lynn and our son Craig. The terror of what happened and the horror of what might have happened is with us in every waking moment.
“This horrific experience angered me beyond belief. We are a normal, law-abiding family and no one should have to suffer the way that we have done. For the criminals to use me is bad enough but to kidnap my wife and child and put guns against their heads and threaten them with death is something so frightening that words cannot convey them today.”
The statement, dictated by Dixon, was read out by Paul Fullicks, the security director of Securitas. In it, Dixon asked: “I mean, how would you have felt? All that was precious to you, your family, placed in unimaginable danger through no fault of their own, entirely because of someone else’s greed.
“This crime was not about money for us, it was about our survival. I would like to tell everyone today about the bravery of Lynn and Craig. It was his birthday yesterday. He was just nine years old and he is still in deep shock about what happened. He will carry this for the rest of his life.
“How dare they do this to a little boy, to a family? I would like to appeal to the public today to think if they can help the police catch the criminals who treated my family so menacingly. No one else should have to experience such an ordeal in their hands again.” Security industry sources have revealed that Dixon had no key or code to allow himself into the building.
The robbers, wearing balaclava masks and carrying handguns, threatened to kill his son unless a security guard in a bullet-proof, bomb-proof pod inside the depot — who could see what was happening via an intercom CCTV system — allowed them through a security door.
Detectives yesterday released a new e-fit of another member of the gang, who posed as police officers when they abducted Dixon’s wife and son. He was described as having “a sickly, pasty complexion”. Forensic experts continued to examine five abandoned vehicles involved in the robbery, including a Ford Transit van with millions of pounds wrapped in two black polythene packages still inside. It was dumped in a hotel car park two miles from the Eurostar railway station at Ashford.
The white 7.5-ton Renault truck used to drive off with the money from the depot was still missing, however. As the investigation continued in Britain, detectives from Kent were starting work in Spain on investigating a possible connection with members of the London underworld living on the Costa del Sol.
Sources said police were trying to trace two men who had previously been linked to the failed attempt to steal the world’s most expensive diamond from the Millennium Dome in 2000. The Northern Ireland police, who investigated the £26.5m robbery at the Northern Bank in Belfast in December 2004, have offered to send a team of officers to Kent this week to advise on how they tackled the crime. It too involved a gang dressing up as police officers.
Flying Squad officers from the Metropolitan police expect the gang to give themselves away. One detective said: “They’re likely to be caught by bragging or spending. People think that because they’ve done an organised robbery, these robbers will be clever about how they deal with the money.
“But their weak link is stupidity. They’re likely to do something stupid — which will lead to them getting caught.” The Bank of England has launched an investigation under Sir John Gieve, its deputy governor, into possible security lapses that allowed the gang into the Tonbridge depot, one of 30 note-circulation centres outsourced to security firms and dotted around the country.
The security industry has begun its own review. In future senior employees such as Dixon are likely to be given panic buttons in their cars or high-technology “voice bars” that they can pull open to start an immediate dialogue with their control rooms if their cars are stopped or tailed.
The industry has brought in psychologists to study the reactions of victims in robberies and has found that if another human life is in danger, staff will normally act automatically to help. In future it wants computerised systems with disembodied Big Brother-like voices issuing commands to staff seeking access to high-security buildings.
Dixon, a former Barclays bank manager, stopped his Nissan Almera on the A249 near Sittingbourne after being pulled over by a Volvo car that had a blue flashing light in its front grille. Men posing as police officers forced him into the Volvo where he was handcuffed. His Nissan was dumped in a pub car park.
The Volvo, which police revealed yesterday had been stolen in Croydon on February 1 and equipped with false plates, drove towards Tonbridge through the Kent countryside. At one point it stopped and Dixon was transferred to a van, tied up and then driven to a farm building. All Dixon has been able to tell police about the location was that it was down a bumpy lane.
Detectives now believe the gang waited for well over an hour so that Dixon’s family would be concerned that he had not arrived home. It was not until 8pm that two bogus policemen called at the Dixons’ £250,000 detached house and told his wife, a part-time worker for the Inland Revenue, that he had been involved in a road accident.
They lured her and Craig outside on the pretext of driving them to the hospital, but then abducted them in a separate car. A police e-fit yesterday showed one of the two abductors. He was aged 45 to 49, 6ft to 6ft 2in tall, and had a long, thin nose, thin lips and a bony chin. He was wearing dark police-style clothing and possibly a wig and false moustache.
Mother and son were driven inland in the direction of Faversham, and after a few miles they were transferred into the back of a red van, possibly with Parcelforce logos on the side. This drove them to the farm building where Dixon was being held. Lynn Dixon was briefly allowed to meet and talk to her husband to reassure her that he was alive and well.
She and her son were driven off in a Renault lorry while her husband was put in a separate vehicle. Just before 1.30am on Wednesday the two vehicles arrived at the Tonbridge depot and the robbery took place. Detectives are convinced the gang had inside help. One former detective estimated that they had spent £40,000 in planning the robbery.
Roy Ramm, a former Metropolitan police commander in charge of Scotland Yard’s specialist operations, said there was a history of armed robbers emanating from the “Bermondsey triangle” of south London. He said: “The police are going to be looking for an inside agent who gave them details of where to be and what to do. When they interview the witnesses inside the depot it will put pressure on the guilty person. Often the inside agent is revealed by others who say there is something not quite right about this.”
The police may adopt methods used in the Brink’s- Mat investigation in which detectives took statements from the witnesses and then got them to act out their actions on videotape. A security guard was exposed as the inside man because he claimed to have witnessed things he could not have seen.
Adrian Leppard, the assistant chief constable of Kent, appealed yesterday for people who may have seen the abductions, the changeover to the red van or any unusual activity in a rural setting. “Please think back, for however trivial something may seem to you, it could be an important piece in the jigsaw to help us solve this crime and catch a gang of dangerous criminals,” he said.
Additional reporting: Liam Clarke, Ali Hussain and Steven Swinford
Charlie
hewitt.mobi Posted at 3:36 am |
0 comments
0 Comments:
All this will not be finished in the first hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin. - John F. Kennedy
