KARACHI: An armed robber holding a hand grenade on Friday morning entered a private bank in North Nazimbad and threatened the guards and staff with the gun and grenade before taking away Rs1.9 million, officials said.

The police sounded confident that the heist said to be first of its kind in the city would be solved soon with the arrest of the lone robber, as they had obtained the footage from the closed-circuit television cameras of the bank.

According to officials at the Tamuria police station, the robber arrived at the Bank Al Habib Ltd branch, situated in Haroon Shopping Centre, at around 10:30am. He showed a hand grenade to the three guards posted there who ran for safety, the police said. The robber went straight to the cash counter where he threatened the staff with the hand grenade, forcing them to flee and collected more than Rs1,940,000, the police added.

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The CCTV showed him leaving the bank premises without his pistol. He returned to get the pistol and then tried to flee on a parked motorbike but it developed some fault. He had to threaten some bystanders with the hand grenade to get their support for riding the motorbike.

“This was a unique type of bank robbery that also happened to be this year’s first bank heist in Karachi,” said SIU SSP Farooq Awan.

“Sporting a beard, the suspect carried a handkerchief but it does not prove that he was a militant, as he was not a professional robber. He did not know how to operate pistol and motorbike,” he said.

Mr Awan said that the robber was likely to be arrested very soon.

However, he said, the incident put a question mark over performance of the security guards who just fled without posing any resistance. He added that the robbery also showed that still many bank branches were not following the SOP prescribed by State Bank of Pakistan for setting up security bunkers on their premises.

Published in Dawn, February 28th, 2015

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