Five Bosnian police arrested for armed robbery

  • 16/01/2016
Five Bosnian police arrested for armed robbery

Five members of a special Bosnian Serb police unit have been arrested on suspicion of robbing a bank van using automatic rifles and an anti-tank missile launcher.

The heist occurred in September last year when heavily-armed robbers held up a vehicle belonging to the Bosnian branch of Italian Unicredit bank on a highway in Bosnia's autonomous Serb Republic.

One security guard was wounded.

Bosnia's two autonomous regions, the Serb Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, have their own separate police forces, as well as a national police force.

Serb Republic prosecution official Darko Ilic on Friday (local time) said a "significant amount of money" had been seized during the arrests and that the suspects had bought luxury vehicles.

He told a news conference that the weapons used in the robbery were the personal property of the arrested police officers and were found buried on a nearby mountain.

"I particularly regret that these young guys, whose careers were stainless when we admitted them into our ranks and trained them, have disgraced in such a way their unit and the whole police force," Serb Republic Interior Minister Dragan Lukac told the news conference.

Reuters