June 17, 2022
deposit boxes that thieves emptied after they broke into the bank over the three-day holiday weekend for the death anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Below, news photographers take pictures of some of the 13 suspects the police say they have arrested for the crime.
Thieves broke into a Bank Melli branch in downtown Tehran and made off with the contents of 168 safe deposit boxes over a long holiday weekend, the bank announced.
The thieves didn’t bother to steal any bank cash, perhaps disinterested because the rial had been plummeting in value before the heist.
The theft immediately became a major issue and the police were under public pressure to do something.
Four days after the robbery was discovered (when the bank reopened June 6 after the holiday), the police announced they had arrested 13 people and recovered part of the loot.
The police said three of the suspects were arrested in Turkey and handed over to Iran while the other 10 were arrested in Tehran and in the north of the country. The police said they also found much of the stolen goods in a car parked at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport.
The police allowed news photographers to take pictures of several of the men lined up against a police department wall. The police also put on display packets filled with foreign currency, gold and documents lifted from the safety deposit boxes.
The police gave no explanation of how they were able to crack the case so quickly, especially with some of the culprits having left the country.
Early reports said bank employees were suspected of having been part of the plot, but after the suspects were put on display Tehran’s police chief said no bank staffers were among the accused. He complained of inadequate security and said that one month before the heist, police specialists had inspected the bank branch and warned of inadequate security.
Earlier, there was an angry demonstration by safety deposit box renters in front of the bank, near the campus of the University of Tehran, during which the police fired in the air. The bank said it would reimburse the safety deposit box holders for 50 percent of their claimed losses.
Box renters don’t tell the bank what is in their boxes. It may be gold or it may be photos of grandma. There is no way for the bank to know the value of the boxes’ contents.
For the same reason, there was no way to immediately know the value of what the thieves took away with them, although news outlets were quick to claim it was the biggest bank heist in Iranian history.
Before the arrest of the 13, the police said they were questioning several suspects, including some bank employees. They said three were being interrogated in custody. But it is the norm for the police to claim they have suspects whether they do or do not and the police did not say if any of those questioned early in the week were among those arrested and shown off June 10.
Before the arrests, Bank Melli announced it had fired the branch manager and his deputy “for negligence.”
Early news reports said the bank’s alarm system did not go to the police but only to the bank manager’s home. The reports said he had ignored the alarm because he got so many false alarms. However, Bank Melli said that was not true. It did not explain what “negligence” warranted the firings.
There was no explanation of how the 168 boxes that were broken into were selected from among the many hundreds of safety deposit boxes at the bank. The bank did not say if the boxes broken into were all clustered together or if the thieves had selected widely separated boxes, suggesting they had some knowledge of the contents or the owners.
Iran was on a three-day holiday June 3-5 marking the death anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It isn’t known how long the thieves were inside, but the holiday would have allowed more time to break in and search for valuable items.
News reports said the thieves broke into the bank’s basement from an adjoining building, then had to penetrate four sealed doors to reach the safety deposit boxes. No one from the police or the bank said how they got through those doors, whether they used any explosives or whether they knew the secret of how to open the doors.
The police said that the thieves not only made off with the contents of the safety deposit boxes, but also swiped the bank’s security cameras and their tapes.
The Bank Melli robbery bares a close resemblance to the one of the most famous bank heists in world history. The Baker Street robbery was an audacious heist in 1971 that netted the criminals an estimated three million pounds (equivalent to $53 million today). They tunneled into a vault below a Lloyds Bank branch in London from a shop two doors down the road. It was organized by a syndicate of five people and, while there were three arrests, only one of the ringleaders was ever caught.
