LONDON, March 19: Thieves hijacked a security van at London’s Heathrow airport on Tuesday and fled with up to three million dollars in cash that had arrived on a South African Airways flight, police said.

The daylight heist was the second multi-million dollar robbery in just over a month at Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest airports, despite heightened security since the Sept 11 hijack attacks on the United States.

Airport officials said they believed both robberies were “inside jobs” because the raiders would have needed special airside identification cards as well as detailed knowledge of security control posts.

Scotland Yard said there was no link to international terrorism.

Police said two men, described as Asians in their 20s, flagged down the van driver and held him at knifepoint. They forced him to drive out of a security gate before they dumped the van and sped off in another vehicle.

“The driver was not hurt and he immediately alerted police,” Detective Superintendent Tim White told reporters at the airport.

White said the cash was in two large, silver containers and appealed for any witnesses who might have seen the vehicle-swap on the side of the road.

A statement from South African Airways in London said “the two cargo packages had arrived on SA234 from Johannesburg earlier this morning. Details of the cargo are confidential.”

A spokesman for South African Airways in Johannesburg had said earlier that the robbers had posed as airport staff to steal the “precious cargo” from two SAA flights. But the London office confirmed only one flight was involved.

In a strikingly similar robbery last month, thieves escaped with 6.5 million dollars in foreign currency after raiding a British Airways security van at the airport.—Reuters