BRUSSELS — They arrived at Brussels Airport armed with automatic weapons and dressed in police uniforms aboard two vehicles equipped with blue police lights. But their most important weapon was information: the eight hooded gangsters who on Monday evening seized diamonds worth tens of millions of dollars from a passenger plane preparing to depart for Switzerland knew exactly when to strike — just 18 minutes before takeoff.
Forcing their way through the airport’s perimeter fence, the thieves raced, police lights flashing, to Flight LX789, which had just been loaded with diamonds from a Brink’s armored van from Antwerp, Belgium, and was getting ready for an 8:05 p.m. departure for Zurich.
“There is a gap of only a few minutes” between the loading of valuable cargo and the moment the plane starts to move, said Caroline De Wolf, a spokeswoman for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre, an industry body that promotes the diamond business in Belgium. “The people who did this knew there was going to be this gap and when.”
They also knew they had to move swiftly in a secure airport zone swarming with police officers and security guards. Waving guns that the Brussels prosecutors’ office described as “like Kalashnikovs,” they calmly ordered ground staff workers and the pilot, who was outside the plane making a final inspection, to back off and began unloading scores of gem-filled packets from the cargo hold. Without firing a shot, they then sped away into the night with a booty that the Antwerp Diamond Centre said was worth around $50 million but which some Belgian news media reported as worth much more.
The thieves’ only error: they got away with 120 packets of diamonds but left some gems behind in their rush.
“They were very, very professional,” said the Brussels prosecutor Ine Van Wymersch, who said the whole operation lasted barely five minutes. The police, she added, are now examining whether the thieves had inside information. “This is an obvious possibility,” she said.
Passengers, already on board the plane awaiting takeoff, had no idea anything was amiss until they were told to debark because their Zurich-bound flight, operated by Helvetic Airways, had been canceled.
“I am certain this was an inside job,” said Doron Levy, an expert in airport security at a French risk management company, Ofek. The theft, he added, was “incredibly audacious and well organized,” and beyond the means of all but the most experienced and strong-nerved criminals. “In big jobs like this we are often surprised by the level of preparation and information: they know so much they probably know the employees by name.”
He said the audacity of the crime recalled in some ways the so-called Pink Panther robberies, a long series of brazen raids on high-end jewelers in Geneva, London and elsewhere attributed to criminal gangs from the Balkans. But he said the military precision of Monday’s diamond robbery and the targeting of an airport suggested a far higher level of organization than the cruder Pink Panther operations.
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The police have yet to make any arrests related to the airport robbery, said the prosecutor, but have found a burned-out white van that they believe may have been used by the robbers. It was found near the airport late on Monday.
Scrambling to crack a crime that has delivered an embarrassing blow to the reputation of Brussels Airport and Antwerp’s diamond industry, the Belgian police are now looking into possible links with earlier robberies at the same airport. The airport, which handles nearly daily deliveries of diamonds to and from Antwerp, the world’s leading diamond trading center, has been targeted on three previous occasions since the mid-1990s by thieves using similar methods to seize gems and other valuables. Most of the culprits in those robberies have been caught.
Jan Van Der Cruysse, a spokesman for the airport, insisted that security was entirely up to international standards, but “what we face is organized crime with methods and means not addressed in aviation security measures as we know them today.” Precautions intended to combat would-be bombers and other threats, he added, could not prevent commando-style raids by heavily armed criminals. “This involves much more than an aviation security problem.”
The robbery also signaled how vulnerable sprawling airport complexes can still be despite a steady tightening of security measures since the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Most of these have been aimed at screening passengers inside the terminal buildings, not at securing the tarmac outside.
“This will give everyone a cold shower, everyone from the Homeland Security Department in the U.S. to the airline transport industry and insurance companies worldwide,” said John Shaw of SW Associates, a risk management company in Paris. “You have to rethink the whole game — how to approach security on a large static target like an airport.”
The robbery has also rattled Antwerp’s diamond industry at a time when the city, a diamond trading and cutting hub for centuries, is struggling to fend off a challenge from low-wage diamond cutters in India and elsewhere.
“The fact that this happened is a big problem for us. We have our No. 1 position to defend. Security is obviously very important,” said Ms. De Wolf of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. “We are shocked by the fact this could ever happen. We are all wondering, ‘How is this possible?’ ”
Diamonds traded in Antwerp last year, she said, had a total value of $51.9 billion, accounting for 80 percent of the world’s rough diamond trade and 50 percent of trade in polished gems. Ms. De Wolf said Monday’s robbery was the biggest she could recall.
Helvetic Airways, an independent Swiss airline that operated the plane hit by the robbery, said security for valuable cargo is normally the responsibility of the airport and the security company hired to transport valuable cargo to the plane. The airline’s spokesman in Zurich declined to comment further.
Diamonds bought in Antwerp for either cutting or sale abroad are usually taken to Brussels Airport, about 25 miles away, under police escort in armored security vans hired from Brinks and other companies. “We take security very seriously,” Ms. De Wolf said. “We are all in shock.”
