BRUSSELS, Feb 19: Antwerp, the capital of the world’s gem trade, was in shock Wednesday as Belgian police struggled to unravel what appears to have been the biggest diamond heist ever.

Thieves over the weekend emptied more than 100 vaults from a heavily guarded Antwerp trading centre bristling with sophisticated technology, getting away with diamonds worth millions of euros (dollars).

The robbery was the northern port city’s biggest since two Israelis and a Brazilian in 1994 lifted diamonds worth 4.55 million dollars. The trio have appealed against their conviction.

Police are still working out how much the stolen diamonds were worth. But the total will reach “several million euros” and will easily surpass the amount taken in 1994, one prosecutor said.

Yet the impact on the town’s conscience goes beyond even that startling heist, as memories turn back to a 1981 bomb attack on the diamond quarter which killed three people and wounded more than 100.

Police are baffled as to how the thieves behind the weekend heist, which was discovered by a caretaker on Monday morning, made off with diamonds from 123 of the 160 basement vaults in the Antwerp Diamond Cen-tre.

“The federal police haven’t arrested or implicated anyone yet,” the spokeswoman for Antwerp’s prosecution office, Leen Nuyts, told AFP. “For now, this remains very mysterious.”

But the Flemish-language newspaper De Standaard was clear where the finger of blame should point.

“The weekend break-in amounts to a profound shock for Antwerp’s diamond sector because all the elements point to the robbers having benefited from inside help,” it said.

Security cameras were tampered with, the burglars knew the entry code for the strongroom and sensors on each vault failed to work, the paper said.

It added that the shock was “as deep as the 1981 bomb attack”, which was blamed on anti-semitic extremists.

Antwerp’s diamond trade is controlled by Orthodox Jews, and increasingly now by businessmen from the Indian subcontinent.

The Diamond High Council, which represents Antwerp’s gemstone traders, admitted the repercussions of the raid could be serious for an industry that prides itself on its discretion and security.—AFP