Tanzanian Police Foil $30m 'Great Plane
Robbery' Gold Heist
Garry
White
Jan. 6
(Telegraph) -- Tanzanian police have foiled a $30.6m (£19.8m) bullion robbery,
which would have rivalled the £25m Brinks Mat gold heist from Heathrow in 1983
if it had succeeded. In the latest security incident to hit the country's
miners, five masked men raided an airstrip owned by South African group AngloGold
Ashanti.
The
heavily-armed men emerged from a nearby forest and attempted to steal 587
kilogrammes of gold bars from an aeroplane at the group's Geita mine, Reuters
reported.
The
attack was thwarted by police from Mwanza, located on the shores of Lake
Victoria.
"Incidents
such as these are usually carried out by a syndicate and also involve somebody
from the inside who told the robbers that a plane usually flies from the
airstrip every Thursday with gold bars," Deusdedit Nsimeki, Mwanza's regional crimes
officer, said.
"The
robbers, who wore military-style clothing, had sub-machine guns and hand grenades.
They were trying to steal a cargo of gold bars weighing some 586.6 kilos, which
is worth billions of shillings," Mr Nsimeki added.
Raids on
gold mines are not uncommon in Tanzania. In May last year seven "criminal
intruders" were killed at one of African Barrick Gold's mines in the north
of the country. It was estimated that 1,500 people took part in this raid, attacking the local police
with machetes, rocks and hammers.
As a
result, FTSE 100-listed African Barrick said in October that it planned to
build a 14 kilometre long wall around its North Mara mine to prevent any future incursions.
In the
latest attempted gold theft, one of the robbers was killed and police recovered
two sub-machine guns and a pistol. Local police said that one of AngloGold's
expatriate workers suffered minor bullets wounds and was evacuated to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital,
for treatment.
The
Geita mine is the largest producing mine in Tanzania. The country's economy is
mostly based on agriculture, but it has vast quantities of unexploited natural
resources
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