Video: Securitas cash hidden in Cyprus?

Colin Dixon was driving home from work one day in February 2006 when he was pulled over by two police officers. They insisted that he had been speeding and must accompany them in their car to a police station. When he got in, he was kidnapped at gunpoint and taken to a farm.

At the same time his wife, Lynn, found two officers knocking on her front door as she cooked the family meal. They told her to get her child and go with them to hospital because her husband had been involved in a car crash.

Finding it odd that the “officers” turned on a local music radio station in the unmarked police car, she demanded to see their identification but was instead shown a gun. Fearing for her child she did as she was told.

Unwittingly Mr Dixon, manager of a Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, and his wife were to play a key role in the biggest robbery in Britain — one that was executed in only 66 minutes and netted a haul of £52,996,760.

At the farm they were threatened at gunpoint with the words “You will die if you do not do as you are told” before the robbers took them to the depot. There the manager was told that he would “get a hole in his head if he did not cooperate”. He was led by one of the fake officers and ordered to tell his 14 staff to let them in because the police wanted to check the plant.

The closed-circuit television cameras inside the Securitas depot captured, moment by moment, the calculated violence and cold execution of the robbery. The gang, faces hidden behind grotesque latex masks, were filmed hurriedly emptying cages of sacks of cash and loading them into a 7.5tonne lorry. Brandishing Skorpion machineguns, pump-actions shotguns and an AK47 assault rifle they ordered the staff to do exactly as they were told or be shot.

Members of staff were seen on the security camera footage cowering at gunpoint as they were tied up.

“Let’s rock and roll,” shouted one of the gang as the Dixons and the other staff members were forced into the now empty cages.

“Don’t do anything silly — we know where you live,” shouted one man in a final threat. Another thanked them, sarcastically, for their cooperation. Then, with a screech of tyres from the last of the getaway cars, they were gone.

It was 2.43am on February 22, 2006. A crime planned in meticulous detail for more than a year had been executed audaciously and with maximum speed.

The final preparations had begun several hours before when Lea Rusha, a former roofer with numerous convictions for violence, and another man who cannot be named for legal reasons, stopped Mr Dixon, 52, as he drove home. After the raid Mr Dixon said: “The terror of what happened is with us every waking moment.”

Although the gang thought that they had taken every precaution to avoid detection, the equipment they had used in the preparation of the raid had left a digital trail. Nearly six months before the raid a man was spoken to by police late at night while he was in his parked car outside the depot. He was moved on and ordered to produce his driving documents. This apparently innocent behaviour is now thought to have been part of the early reconnaissance of the depot.

The gang’s “inside man” — Emir Hysenaj, 28, an Albanian who had arrived in Britain illegally but who had obtained a job in the depot — wore a belt fitted with a tiny pin-hole camera. His pictures showed the detailed workings of the money-sorting plant, used by the Bank of England and leading supermarkets.

But when the camera became dislodged from the belt some of the gang went back to the shop demanding that the owner fit the device properly. That shopkeeper gave police details of the men’s identities.

Jetmir Bucpapa, 26, another Albanian, and a woman due to stand trial later this year, also used a bag fitted with a secret video camera to record the movements of Mr Dixon and his 46-year-old wife at their home in Herne Bay, Kent. Police uniforms were bought on eBay, the internet auction site, and worn by two kidnappers, including Rusha, 35, when persuading Mr Dixon to accompany them to the police station. When police raided Rusha’s home they discovered the video recording Bucpapa had made of the Dixons’ home on his computer hard drive.

The film, made from the inside of a car, showed a distinctive crack in the windscreen that was identical to damage to Bucpapa’s windscreen on the car in which he and Rusha were arrested. The Albanan’s in-car satellite navigation system had also been programmed to direct him to Mr Dixon’s home. Records from Bucpapa’s mobile phone, which was pinpointed as being in the Herne Bay area at that time of the video recording, also showed that he had contacted other members of the gang 693 times in the build-up to the robbery.

A hand-drawn floor plan of the depot was found at Rusha’s home covered with his fingerprints, along with the colour-coding details for cash wrappers used by Securitas and a police uniform and a scanner tuned to Kent Police’s radio frequency. Keys at Rusha’s property led detectives to a lockup containing £8.61 million.

Police also traced through computer records the eBay purchase of police uniforms, and they discovered that Stuart Royle had used internet companies to trace the Dixons’ address. Later on, night-vision goggles were also seized by police.

Roger Coutts’s DNA was found on 11 of the cable ties used to bind the Securitas employees. A balaclava and overalls identical to those photographed being worn in the raid were also seized.

The jury of ten men convicted Rusha, a former roofer from South-borough, Tunbridge Wells; Stuart Royle, 49, a car salesman from Maidstone; Bucpapa, 26, unemployed from Tonbridge; Roger Coutts, 30, a garage owner from Welling, southeast London; and Emir Hysenaj, a Post Office worker granted leave to stay in Britain after marrying a British woman, from Crowborough, East Sussex.

John Fowler, 59, from Staplehurst, Kent, was cleared of the charges. Keith Borer, 54, a sign writer, from Maidstone, Kent, was cleared of handling stolen goods.

Only £21 million of the total haul was recovered, leaving about £32 million outstanding.

However, the cost of convicting the gang has nearly exceeded the total seized, after the trial ran up a bill of more than £16 million and the police investigation cost a further £5 million.

Kidnap couple haunted by memories

— The kidnapping of the Tonbridge depot manager Colin Dixon, his wife, Lynn, and their child, was at the heart of the gang’s plan

— The couple told the court how their lives were haunted by the memories of being held hostage at gunpoint by “agitated” kidnappers

— Mr Dixon was forced to help the robbers to gain access to the depot after being warned: “Don’t forget, we’ve got your wife and family”

— Mr Dixon told the court: “I’d never, ever, been through anything like that before. I was the most scared that I’d ever been in my life”

— After the raid Mr Dixon said: “The terror of what happened is with us every waking moment”

— His wife told jurors that she feared for the life of her child: “I thought we had served our purpose and that was it.” She was “horrified” that the gang would involve her child in the plot and believed the robbers “just did not have any feelings”

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