Hunt for £250K handbag burglars: Police release CCTV images of three men who stole hoard of luxury gear from designer boutique after tunneling through 3ft-wide chimney stack
Police today released CCTV photos of brazen thieves who drilled through the wall of a derelict property to steal £250,000 worth of luxury handbags from a boutique.
The 55 items, with some valued at as much as £25,000 each and much sought-after by celebrities, were snatched as burglars ransacked the store on Sunday night.
Three intruders got round Dress Cheshire's sophisticated security set-up by smashing through a 3ft wide chimney stack.
One raider used a duvet cover as a pouch to carry off the pre-owned designer bags from brands including Hermes, Chanel, Gucci, Dior and Louis Vuitton.
Police were on the scene at Prestbury - popular with Premier League footballers and celebrities - 'within minutes' but the gang had already fled.
Now, officers at Cheshire Constabulary have released new CCTV images of three men they are looking to speak to as part of the investigation.
Detective Constable Clare Slattery, of Macclesfield CID, said: 'Enquiries in relation to this incident are ongoing and we're committed to doing all we can to identify the people responsible.
'As part of our investigation we're keen to identify the men pictured in the CCTV images as we believe they may hold vital information.
'If you recognise the men, please contact us. I would also like to appeal directly to the men in the CCTV images to get in touch.'
The items stolen included a Hermes Birkin 25 Swift that could sell for £24,500, a Hermes Kelly 32 Crocodile handbag valued at £23,995 and a Hermes Birkin 35 Togo at £15,995.
Owner Christine Colbert, 58, watched the raid unfold in horror and disbelief from her home. She said: 'I went to bed about 10.30pm on Sunday so I was asleep when we got a call from the monitoring company.
'I immediately switched on the CCTV on my phone and I could see a man crouching down and bricks all over the floor. I said to my husband Gary, 'We're being robbed'. I was panicking.'
Watching the footage back, she could hear the noise of drilling for over an hour before the raiders broke through.
Mrs Colbert added: 'They were big burly men, and they were all in black with goggles, balaclavas, and gloves. They took three or four minutes to whirl round the shop and grab all the bags.
It is the second time the shop in Prestbury has been victim to a robbery in just over a year
'One man had a duvet tied round his neck like a pouch which he threw the bags in. Another man put everything up his arms – they were full of bags.
'Then they hurled the handbags through the hole they'd made. Respect for the bags was zero.'
The gang dropped just two of the bags, which were among the least valuable.
The next-door building was empty following an arson attack. Neighbours had noticed 'workmen' at the site but they assumed it was being renovated.
However, it is now believed the gang were plotting their attack, boarding up the windows and entering the shop via a fireplace.
It is the second time in just over a year thieves have targeted Mrs Colbert, with a gang previously breaking in via a window and stealing items worth £180,000.
That prompted her to beef up security but she is now faced with a decision on whether to continue displaying the luxury goods in her store, which attracts collectors from around the country.
Mrs Colbert said of the raid: 'This has been very well thought through – it's very frightening for me. I have to showcase my products. I despair. I can't believe the lengths they have gone to.
'It used to be watches people wanted – now it's handbags and they are worth more second-hand than they are new.
'I doubt I'll see the stolen bags again – they will now go on the black market.'
With Wilmslow and Alderley Edge, Prestbury makes up the 'golden triangle' of Cheshire towns favoured by celebrities and sports stars around the North West.
However, the area has been frequently targeted by burglars including one gang who snatched more than 100 rare handbags worth more than £1million when they raided a home in Alderley Edge in March.
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If you ever thought, as I did growing up there, that Northern Ireland's fame was limited to 30 years of bombs and bullets, or building a ship that sank on its maiden voyage — you'd better think again. Twenty-one years ago, we were also host to the biggest robbery in British or Irish history at the time — in fact, the sixth biggest robbery in the world. Pretty impressive, eh? In one sense, it was impressive. On December 20, 2004, £26.5 million in cash was stolen from the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast's city centre — in clear view of the public as Christmas shoppers strolled round the continental market just feet away. Glenn Patterson, an admired Belfast-based novelist, has written a book showing how the robbers did it, and how they got away with it. It was not just a monetary robbery, but a symbolic one. The Northern Bank building is a landmark in Belfast's post-industrial city centre, a great, sturdy 1970s edifice in concrete. It's a building you can imagine Bill Bixby walking out of, coat over shoulder, in the credits for The Incredible Hulk. But the robbery was not the first of its kind that year. Already in 2004 there had been other 'tiger kidnappings', where robbers would take family members hostage and force bank employees to help them to carry out the heist. In response, the Northern Bank had changed its operations so that two key holders were needed simultaneously to access its cash vaults. The criminals' solution? To abduct two employees' family members at once. Kevin McMullan, the bank's assistant manager, and Chris Ward, a junior employee, both had a knock on the door the night before the robbery. Armed men took over their homes and held their families hostage while McMullan and Ward were taken away. The men were held overnight, then told to go to work the next day and act normally. At clocking-off time they were to use their access to remove cash from the vault, disguised in containers to look like rubbish, and load it into a waiting white van. And so they did: great blocks and boxes of new and used notes, kilos upon kilos of it. The cover of Patterson's book shows a CCTV image of Ward leaving the bank's side entrance with a holdall over one shoulder. The holdall contains £1.2 million. Little wonder he's leaning to one side to counter the weight. So who did it? There's no doubt: the only criminal outfit in Northern Ireland with the organisational capability to plan and execute the robbery so methodically was the IRA. (The single sign of amateurishness was that two men in the van wore Russ Abbot-style ginger 'Jimmy' wigs beneath their baseball caps. This odd sight alerted passersby and almost foiled the robbery.) Opinions are divided on why the IRA carried out the robbery. For a pension fund? Investment abroad? • The 21 best history books of the past year to read next The whole story is presented beautifully by Patterson, who adopts the right tone for each phase of the tale. The abduction scenes have the horrible tension of a thriller, and reminded me of Brian Moore's great Troubles novel Lies of Silence. Elsewhere, Patterson adopts a tone of amused incredulity at the shocking details of the robbery and its aftermath. 'You have to take your hat off to this country. It has a way of exceeding your worst, most lavish expectations.' But the robbery also presented a political problem for the British and Irish governments. In 2004, the fledgling Northern Ireland Assembly had collapsed, and there were 'talks about talks' to get it up and running again. Indeed, when MI5 detected high levels of phone activity between senior IRA men the night before the robbery, they optimistically — naively — thought it meant an announcement was imminent on the decommissioning of IRA weapons, to break the political deadlock. When it was announced who the likely culprits were, Sinn Fein — the IRA's political wing — complained of a smear on republicans. But as Patterson points out, in one of the few passages where he sounds truly angry, this was a common tactic for Sinn Fein. He reminds us about the brutal murder of Robert McCartney after an argument in a Belfast bar in January 2005, when nobody in the pub — including the future Stormont minister Deirdre Hargey of Sinn Fein — would speak to the police about what happened. Instead, Hargey claimed that reports of IRA involvement in the murder were 'part of the onslaught by the media and governments and political parties to criminalise Sinn Fein and the republican movement'. As Patterson coolly observes: 'There is chutzpah, and there is chutzpah.' • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Hardly any of the money has been recovered, and only one person was prosecuted for the robbery. That person was … one of the victims, Chris Ward, who was prosecuted on circumstantial evidence that the robbery had been an inside job — the IRA men were so well prepared that someone in the bank must have helped them. The case was abandoned partway through. Patterson attended every day of the trial. The case was clearly not an outstanding example of prosecutorial craft. Phil Flynn, who was vice president of Sinn Fein, took the view that 'there was nobody killed. At the end of the day, it was only money.' But it wasn't only money. The robbery revealed a lot about what was important in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein was welcomed back into government. And in a world where every conspiracy theorist sees two-tier justice in any outcome they don't like, the aftermath of the robbery provided a real example. The senior IRA man Bobby Storey — believed to be the brains behind the robbery, and 'a great human being' in the words of Gerry Adams — died in June 2020 and his funeral attracted more than 1,500 people, in contravention of Covid regulations. Other people could have no more than 30 at theirs. None of the Sinn Fein politicians who attended were prosecuted, while at a Black Lives Matter protest in Belfast a few weeks earlier, 70 people were fined. Patterson had once planned to write a screenplay of the robbery. I wish he had. It has everything: tension, dark comedy, human interest, big issues and more. But this book will do very nicely in its place. And if the Northern Bank heist was indeed a symbolic robbery, then here is the other symbol. Why did they do it? Because they knew they could get away with it. As Patterson points out: 'Something [else] disappeared in that white van in December 2004 that has never been recovered.' The Northern Bank Job: The Heist and How They Got Away With It by Glenn Patterson (Head of Zeus £16.99 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
