KARACHI: Robbers looted over Rs5 million from another bank branch in Nazimabad on Thursday afternoon, Gulbahar police said.

A day earlier Rs1m was looted from a bank in North Nazimabad Block N.

The police said that on Thursday five gunmen stormed the Soneri Bank branch in Nazimabad 2 at around 1.30pm.

They snatched a TT pistol from a guard posted outside the bank and relieved another guard posted inside the branch of a repeater gun as both guards did not put up any resistance.

They walked off with around Rs5.9 million, said Gulbahar SHO Arif Razzak.

The robbers aged between 25 and 27 were wearing shirts and trousers and shalwar kameez and had arrived there on motorcycles. While fleeing, they threw away the repeater, but took away the TT pistol, the police added.

The closed-circuit television cameras installed at the bank showed that as the robbers entered the bank, the cashier opened the cash room without being put under any threat by the robbers, the Gulbahar SHO said.

Two other employees sitting at the cash counter took shelter under the table but the cashier did not do so. The footage disclosed that the armed men did not aim their guns at the cashier or put him under any threat, said the police officer.

When interrogators grilled the cashier that why he opened the cash room, he told them that he became ‘scared’, said the SHO.

However, the police investigators were not ‘satisfied’ with his response and decided to take the cashier and guards into custody for further questioning.

The bank also did not follow the standard operating procedure prescribed by the State Bank of Pakistan as no bunker was set up on its premises, said the Gulbahar police officer.

Just a day earlier, on Wednesday, an Allied Bank branch in North Nazimabad was looted by five gunmen, who took away around Rs1m.

Published in Dawn, November 28th, 2014