DUBLIN (AP) — A day after a gang took a Dublin bank employee’s family hostage and forced him to rob his own branch, the police said Saturday that they had arrested seven suspects and recovered millions of dollars’ worth of stolen cash.
On Friday, six armed, masked men stormed into the rural home of Shane Travers, who works at the Bank of Ireland. They tied up his partner, her 5-year-old son and her mother, and told Mr. Travers that they would be killed unless he cooperated.
He walked out of his bank branch with $9 million, making the robbery the largest in the nation’s history.
The police said Saturday that late Friday they raided a house where they arrested five men and a woman, and stopped a car on a highway ringing Dublin, arresting one man.
A third of the money has been recovered, Sgt. Alan Roughneen said.
Mr. Travers’s family had been abandoned in a van north of Dublin. They escaped on their own and were not seriously harmed.
Such hostage-taking tactics, known here as “tiger kidnappings,” are common in Ireland but have never netted anything close to $9 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/world/europe/01ireland.html