500 Officers Break Into Thousands of Safe Deposit Boxes

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Subject: 500 Officers Break Into Thousands of Safe Deposit Boxes - UK

More than 500 officers smashed their way into thousands of safety-deposit boxes to retrieve guns, drugs and millions of pounds of criminal assets. At least, that's what was supposed to happen.

By ADRIAN LEVY and CATHY SCOTT-CLARK
Last updated at 11:23 PM on 24th October 2009

The Finchley Road is one of the busiest thoroughfares heading out of London. It leads traffi,,c north past Lord's Cricket Ground and the multimillion-....pound houses of some of the country's richest hedge-fund managers all the way to the M1. At three in the afternoon it's always pretty slow going, but on this particular summer Monday the traffi,,c was almost at a standstill.

This was partly because the normal three lanes going north had been cut down to one. But it was also because of drivers slowing down to a crawl so they could gawp at the massive police operation unfolding on a busy corner of the road.

Police vehicles - both cars and menacing armoured trucks - jammed up two lanes. Dozens of armed o,,fficers in bulletproof vests were standing ready, waiting to be called inside an anonymous-....looking building. From the sheer manpower and weapons on display it looked like the capital was under another terrorist attack.

But while this was the Metropolitan Police's most ambitious operation in its 180-year history, it had nothing to do with national security. Only hours before, at a special briefing, teams from SCD6 (the Economic And Specialist Crime unit) and C019 (Specialist Firearms Command) hunkered down with technicians armed with angle grinders and drills. Also present were dog handlers, their animals trained to sniff,, out guns, drugs and explosives.

In all, more than 500 o,,fficers had gathered to receive orders to raid smart addresses in well-heeled parts of the capital. The locations included three of Britain's largest and most well-....established safety-deposit box depositories in Edgware, Hampstead and Park Lane as well as an offi,,ce and the homes of the three directors of Safe Deposit Centres Ltd, which owned the vaults - two in Hampstead and one in Barnet.

For most of those at the briefing, arriving just before 3pm on June 2 last year, this was the first they had heard of the operation. Secrecy had been paramount and, with so many involved, keeping the operation 'airtight' had been one of the largest headaches in the pre-planning for what was codenamed 'Rize'.

The police rolled through London in a convoy: scores of patrol cars, armed-response vehicles, outriders on their bikes, vans with their windows shielded by metal cages. With a Met film unit recording everything, detectives forced their way past startled security guards, demanding receptionists open the secure doors that led to the normally hushed strong rooms, which in the three centres housed 6,717 safety deposit boxes.

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