Bandits did a professional job in the $12M heist at R. Sookraj and Sons store on Regent Street over the holiday weekend, snipping phone wires so that an alarm would not be detected by the security service it was hooked up to.
They then cut through grille and iron work at three separate locations in the store before making a clean getaway.
The MMC Security Service, which the store had contracted to prevent such incidents, is being criticized for its ignorance of the burglary, which was only discovered on Tuesday morning when a call was placed to MMC.
The police had said that sometime between Old Year’s Night and Tuesday morning the store was broken into and cash was stolen from the cambio, the office and a cash register. The break-in was not discovered until the owner turned up on Tuesday morning to open the store. So far, no one has been arrested and police are conducting investigations into the heist.
An official from the security firm told this newspaper that once the telephone lines at a location were cut, the alarm would go off but there would be no signal to the monitoring station, thus no one there would know that the location had been broken into.
The official said this was one of the faults of all burglar alarm systems. He said that the safest security method would be a wireless system. But this, the official said, is very costly.
Alston Sookraj, one of the sons of the proprietor told Stabroek News yesterday that when they arrived around 8 am on Tuesday there was a huge hole in the northern fence and the back door to the building was wide open.
He said that on further inspection of the property a grill door at the back was found wrenched open; the padlock on it had been cut with a blowtorch. The steel door to the office, which is above the cambio, was bashed in, he said.
According to Sookraj, in addition to the stolen cash the thieves also made off with a CD player and a DVD player.
“Nobody informed us that anything had happened. This burglary had to have had heavy noise. Not even the MMC didn’t come and the building was armed [with the burglar alarm].”
Sookraj said whoever carried out the heist had to be professional since they cut the telephone wires, which would trigger the alarm in the event of a break-in. He said they also removed the MMC’s horn when they entered the building.
The man said MMC was defensive when asked why the alarm did not go off when the store was broken into. He said that officials then explained that once the phone lines are cut the alarm will not be triggered.
