Irish bank worker charged with $64m heist

BELFAST - A Northern Bank employee held hostage during one of Britain's biggest bank heists will appear before magistrates later today after police charged him with involvement in the robbery.

Chris Ward, 24, who was held captive in his home in west Belfast ahead of the £26.5 million ($64.86 million) raid in the Northern Irish capital last December, was one of two people arrested on Tuesday, security sources have said.

"A 24-year-old man has been charged with robbery," a police spokesman said. "He's expected to appear at Laganside Magistrates Court this morning."

A police spokeswoman would not confirm the identity of the man charged on Wednesday but said: "We only had one 24-year-old in custody and he has been charged today."

An official familiar with the day's court proceedings in Belfast confirmed that Ward was due to appear during the course of the morning.

The robbery, at the Northern Bank's headquarters in central Belfast, was widely blamed on the Irish Republican Army (IRA), an accusation the guerrilla group has denied.

Ward, who worked as a supervisor in the bank's cash centre, told media following the raid how two men tricked their way into his home the night before the robbery and threatened to kill his family unless he did as he was ordered.

The next day, after the bank had closed, Ward and assistant manager Kevin McMullan - whose family were also being held - cleared the bank's vaults of cash and loaded it into a van provided by the gang.

They had been ordered by the gang to tell security staff they were taking rubbish to be collected by a service company.

Three other people were charged over the robbery in November, one of them with the raid itself, another with making false statements and the third with "collecting and making a record of information likely to be of use to terrorists".

Police said a 35-year-old man arrested on Tuesday morning had been released without charge and that nobody else was currently in custody in relation to the robbery.

The heist, and a highly publicised murder in the city a month later, heaped pressure on the IRA to sever criminal links and ultimately spurred its July pledge to end its 30-year armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Northern Bank later issued redesigned paper currency to thwart attempts to launder the cash, but police said up to 10 million pounds of the haul was untraceable.

So far they have recovered only relatively small amounts of cash thought to be from the raid.

- REUTERS