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Armed Robbers Storm Swiss Casino Take Hundreds Of Thousands In Cash

Posted on March 30th, 2010

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A gang of robbers armed with machine guns broke into a Swiss casino at 4 am on Sunday, startling the more or less 600 gamblers and employees and taking a large amount of cash corresponding to hundreds of thousand of pounds. The Basel Grand Casino, a huge gambling establishment situated on the border with France and Germany, is about three minutes drive from Basel airport. The casino has 357 slot machines and 15 card tables, and as a rule, payments for winnings are given in checks.

The facility is well-known among high-stake gamblers, and regular customers usually have Swiss bank accounts. ‘Europe’s Las Vegas’, as the casino refers to itself, has a hotel which stands next to it, where patrons stay after a night of gambling.

The thieves used a sledge hammer to shatter a locked outer door and once inside, fired shots into the air and at the chandeliers. The ten masked robbers, speaking in French, ordered the workers and customers to lie flat on the floor while they emptied the cash registers. The safe, which was full of cash since it was after the weekend, was left intact as the robbers did not succeed in breaking it.

The gang then left the facility, taking off in two silver Audis, which witnesses said had French plate numbers, and were believed to be going towards the French border, a distance of 200 meters from the casino. A Basel police officer said, “We are working on the assumption that there is a French connection.” Swiss and French police are investigating the case. A security guard and some customers were roughly pushed and shoved, and a female driver was violently forced out of her car because it was accidentally blocking one of the getaway vehicles, but not one was badly hurt in the incident.

“The criminals fired a number of shots, but luckily no one was hit,” said a spokesman for the Basel prosecutor’s office. “It was like an action film heist.”

On March 6, a gang, wielding an automatic pistol and a machete, held up a poker tournament in a hotel in Berlin and took away more than $240,000. Five suspects have been nabbed and German police are still investigating the robbery, and are coordinating with French and Swiss authorities to establish if the two cases are connected.