KARACHI: Some half a dozen armed robbers seized a lone security guard of a private bank in Soldier Bazaar on Saturday night, broke in the facility and broke all 60 lockers carrying cash, jewellery and property documents, etc, before leaving the place on Sunday morning after eight-hour-long robbery, officials said.

The audacious burglary attracted strong protest from locker-holders, who later in the day staged a protest outside the facility of the MCB Bank and demanded recovery of their assets.

Although investigators were not sure about the exact value of the objects taken away by the robbers, they suspected that it could be ‘in millions’ if claims of the locker-holders were taken to be true.

“There were four bandits as told by the only security sitting outside the bank when the robbers came,” said DSP Zahid Hussain, the area sub-divisional police officer (SDPO).

“It is actually not a branch, but a locker facility of the MCB Bank where a number of people, a majority of them retired employees of the same organisation, had hired the lockers to keep their assets safe.”

The officials at the special investigation unit (SIU) tasked with investigating extortion cases along with primary job of probes into bank robberies and terrorism incidents were not clear as to which group was involved in the robbery. More than 10 banks have been looted so far this year alone.

“Even the ethnicity of the robbers has not been ascertained yet,” said DSP Asghar Usman of the SIU. “Initial findings collected through information briefly shared by the security guard suggest that there were four armed bandits, who had brought gas cylinders, cutters and all other necessary stuff to break the lockers. There were 60 lockers with eight of them were empty and they broke all of them.”

He said that the bank management were busy collecting information from the locker-holders to ascertain the exact value of the robbed of material, which included cash, jewellery, property or other important documents and other valuables, which people preferred to keep in lockers for safety.

“The closed-circuit television cameras [CCTV] have been installed, but they were not operational. The bandits took hours to complete their job and the guard says that he was so badly tied with a rope that he could not move and nor triggered off the alarm system. The police have not taken the guard into custody as he is cooperating with us for all due details we need,” added the DSP.

With a decline in terrorist activities and targeted-attacks and killings to a certain extent, the city has witnessed a sudden surge in bank robberies in recent months with more than 10 heists have already been registered during 2014.

However, like a past trend, the investigators have not yet found any major role of the banned outfits involved in bank robberies this year.

“We have so far identified at least 10 suspects involved in this year’s bank robberies, who executed at least five jobs and were associated with professional criminal groups,” said SP Farooq Awan of the SIU.

“Some of them are locals while some belonged to other parts of the province and we have reasons to believe that the robberies registered this year were mostly conducted by locals and inter-provincial criminal groups.”