Cuatro broadcasts the documentary of one of the protagonists of the largest bank robbery in the history of the Region of Murcia
On Christmas Eve 1998, one of the most important criminal groups of the time in Spain committed the largest bank robbery in the history of the Region of Murcia. The thieves managed to loot 89 Banco Popular de Yecla rental safes. While the most faithful attended the traditional Misa del Gallo in the Basilica de la Purísima, this criminal group committed the largest bank robbery in the history of the Region of Murcia.
This event left no one indifferent in the municipality of Murcia, many were affected by the robberies and to this day the residents remember the attack. The Cuatro network broadcast on Monday the first chapter of the documentary about one of the members of the gang that attacked the Banco Popular de Yecla, Jon Imanol Sapieha, better known as ‘El Sapo’. He is one of the biggest criminals in the history of the country and stood out as an expert in concealment. Both he and Ángel Suárez López, better known as Cásper, are known for attacking the Banco Popular in Yecla or for the media theft of Esther Koplowitz’s paintings.
The police and vigilantes conducted a joint operation to dismantle the Cásper gang, which had accumulated crimes related to drug trafficking and extortion for years. In this documentary, ‘El Sapo’ tells about what it was like to work with Casper, but also about their differences. Although ‘El Sapo’ testified in court, he was not charged with anything and was released for this case.
“I came in as Santa Claus, at the time of the great midnight mass,” through the door, since they had replaced the bowler hat with a head hat that would allow any key of the same brand to open the door. They had everything planned, several men were scattered on the main streets of the municipality and communicated thanks to a ‘walkie-talkie’. The criminal group was led by Casper. Antonio Mateos, a member of the gang, was an expert in electronics and was in charge of monitoring police communication frequencies with a scanner to detect the arrival of a patrol car. When they finished robbing the bank, ‘El Sapo’ was in charge of moving the money, first in a van and then in a luxury car parked in Almansa to Madrid.
“They explain to me that there are many furniture factories and people who keep black money in Yecla’s safes,” El Sapo explains. The loot collected was so great that even many unopened boxes were left behind, hundreds of wet bills and the jewels of the Virgen del Castillo, which were kept in one of the boxes. “We took 2,700 million pesetas,” said ‘El Sapo’. In the documentary he stated that he did not expect them to find so much money, in a first box they found 60 envelopes and in each of them was one million pesetas.
Since Christmas Day was a holiday, no one bothered to go to the bank, but on Saturday the 26th, Banco Popular de Yecla employees found a branch that had been dismantled. The thieves left behind a drill they used during the robbery, which allowed investigators to check the serial number of the machine’s batteries, which allowed them to pull the string until they found the gang.
The Superintendent of the Yecla Police Station, Francisco de Paula García Vélez, and the head of the local group of the municipality’s judicial police, José Ros Suárez, went to the company’s headquarters in Liechtenstein and managed to obtain information about the unit. collect. . The company provided them with a copy of the invoice that had the name of one of the members of the group on it. As early as June 1999, the police prepared an operation to arrest the entire gang almost simultaneously.
Finally, on June 18, 1999, during a lightning operation, the police arrested several members of the band. Murcia’s provincial court sentenced just over two years in prison in 2003 for the crimes of theft and illicit contact with 16 people involved in the Banco Popular de Yecla coup, sparking outrage among those affected. The owners of the safe deposit boxes had to wait more than ten years for some of the money stolen from them.
Source: La Verdad
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