31 held in $50m diamond heist

AP / RSS

Prosecutor spokespersons Jean-Marc Meilleur (right) and Anja Bijnens informing the media about the $50 million diamond heist, in Brussels, on Wednesday.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BRUSSELS: Authorities claimed a major breakthrough today in their investigation of a spectacular $50 million diamond heist, detaining at least 31 people in a three-nation sweep some three months after robbers pulled off the theft with clockwork precision at Brussels Airport

A Frenchman who is believed to have been one of the actual

robbers at the airport was arrested in France, while six to eight people were detained in Geneva, and 24 in and around Brussels. Police did not indicate what the other suspects’ roles might have been.

What’s more, police say they have proof that diamonds found in Switzerland were part of the cache that was spirited away in the brazen February 18 robbery that ranks among the biggest diamond heists of recent times.

After two months of investigation on some of the suspects, police moved in. Suspects in France and Switzerland were detained yesterday, and the following day Belgian police carried out a massive operation, with 250 police involved in 40 house searches.

“In Switzerland, we have found diamonds that we can already say are coming from the heist, and in Belgium large amounts of money have been found. And the investigation is still ongoing,” said Jean-Marc Meilleur, a spokesman for the Brussels prosecutor’s office. He said police had also found luxury cars.

Meilleur was scant on detail, yielding no clues how police got on the trail of the suspects.

In Geneva, a police statement said that “a very important quantity of diamonds was seized” during the sweep “coming from the spectacular heist at Brussels airport.” While Belgian authorities spoke of six detentions in Switzerland, Geneva police put it at eight, including a businessman and a lawyer. Authorities were alerted when suddenly a member of a major criminal organisation appeared in their city.

It was the first breakthrough in a robbery that many had started comparing to an “Ocean’s Eleven”-type Hollywood script for its clinically clean execution during which no one was injured.

On a cold winter evening, the diamonds had been loaded on a plane bound for Zurich when robbers, dressed in dark police clothing and hoods, drove through a hole they had cut in the airport fence in two black cars with blue police lights flashing. They drove onto the tarmac, approached the plane, brandished machine guns, offloaded the diamonds, then made their getaway in an operation that barely took five minutes. Later that night, investigators found the charred remains of a van most likely used in the heist, but little else.