Republic Bank attempt robbery…Five head to court today

Jul 14, 2017 Court Stories, Features / Columnists, News

Five men, who were implicated in the attempted robbery at Republic Bank, Water Street, Georgetown branch on July 4 last, are expected to be arraigned before a Magistrate today.
This was confirmed by a police official last evening.
Those who are to be charged are bank employee Jamal Haynes and Keron Saunders, and a police constable and rural constable who reportedly admitted their involvement in the attempted robbery.
This newspaper was unable to confirm if the fifth suspect is the second bank employee, who was allegedly providing information to the suspects from inside.
It was Haynes, Saunders and Elton Wray, an agronomist, who went into the bank and held the employees hostage. Wray was shot dead.
Kaieteur News understands that the men were planning on getting their hands on the night deposits since it was a three-day weekend and companies would have deposited millions into the chute. The robbery on the bank had reportedly been planned three months before.
As customary, a female staffer was supposed to be at the bank at 07:10 hours two Tuesdays ago and should have been emptying the chute and taking the cash to the vault.
According to the bandits’ plan, when they entered the bank, they would have held the staffers hostage and seized the woman who would have been emptying the chute—there they would have grabbed a few bags of cash and escaped.
Everything went according to the plan until the three bandits entered the bank and Haynes did not see his colleague who had access to the chute.
“Hold! She is not there.” This was a text message investigators discovered on a phone belonging to one of the alleged bandits who went into the bank. The text message was reportedly sent by a staffer who was inside the building before the gunmen arrived.
A staffer at the bank said that Haynes panicked because his colleague was not there. She had not arrived at work to empty the chute and take the cash to the vault. Instead, she was at the entrance of the bank when she learnt of the commotion and left.
The alleged bandits had no alternative but to start checking the canister for cash. They also began knocking on the vault to get it open.
Meanwhile, Haynes’s senior colleague and junior staffers were in the vault when they saw what was happening on camera. They immediately called the bank’s security manager who then called the police. By this time, the Professional Guard Services (PGS) in the vicinity reached the scene in less than a minute. There was a 10-minute shootout between the police, guard service and the men before they were held and Wray was killed.

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