Five members of a special a police unit have been arrested on suspicion of robbing a bank van of 617,000 KM using automatic rifles and an anti-tank missile launcher, officials said on Friday.
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 Republika Srpska. One security guard was wounded.
RS prosecution official Darko Ilic 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,” Republika Srpska Interior Minister Dragan Lukac told the news conference.
