Two security staff arrested over UK robbery

Two members of staff at the security firm targeted in Britain's biggest robbery have been arrested - leading to the suspicion that the raiders had inside help.

The man and woman, who were sub-contracted to work for Securitas, were questioned about the £53m robbery at Tonbridge in Kent, police said yesterday.

Police have also revealed that they suspect that some gang members have fled abroad with a significant amount of the stolen cash.

So far detectives have recovered about £20m of the record haul.

The apparent ease with which a gang of robbers kidnapped a Securitas manager, his wife and son, broke into a cash warehouse and stole £53m last month, lead detectives to believe they had information from a security firm insider.

That suspicion was confirmed yesterday when police disclosed that they had arrested a man who had been working for Securitas at the time of the raid, and a woman who was a former employee with the firm.

The two suspects were released on bail.

Assistant Chief Constable Adrian Leppard, of Kent Police, said: "Two members of staff, a man and a woman, who are agency staff sub-contracted to Securitas, have been arrested and released on police bail. I am not prepared to go into their roles at the depot." He refused to say whether or not they were cleaners.

The police investigation is widening beyond Kent and includes sending officers abroad to chase up possible leads and to question suspects.

Mr Leppard said that his officers were studying film from surveillance cameras that cover the ports as well as vehicle number plate recognition systems to discover whether any robbers left Britain in the hours after the robbery.

A van with £1.3m in cash, guns and balaclavas used in the robbery were found abandoned near the Channel Tunnel.

Mr Leppard said: "We have got a fairly wide inquiry basis at the moment that looks at a range of people in a range of areas; a lot of them in this country but not all of them in this country."

A source close to the investigation said officers believe that some of the missing millions may have been smuggled abroad.

Among the people abroad whom the police have spoken to include Nigel Reeve who drove to Spain in a white van two days after the 22 February robbery.

Mr Reeve, who denies any wrong-doing, owns ENR Cars, a vehicle repair business on the Graves Industrial Estate in Welling, south east London, where £9 million of the stolen cash was found.

A source said Kent Police had spoken to Mr Reeve, and he would be spoken to again about the heist.

Police are also examining hundreds of hours of CCTV footage of the various escape routes from the Tonbridge area.

The armed gang were filmed loading the cash into a white lorry at the Securitas depot, but the police had not released the images.

The investigation team has been working with international financial institutions to track the stolen banknotes, some of which are known to be traceable.

The senior officer added that the £2 million reward offered to persuade criminals to turn in the robbers had produced a number of useful calls. He said: "Two million pounds stimulates people. There was an upturn in intelligence coming forward."

He added: "The scale of this investigation and pace of the inquiry has put the criminals under enormous pressure.

"Although this was a well-planned enterprise, the pace of the investigation has caused the robbers to make mistakes."

- INDEPENDENT