Heathrow Robbers get 25 years!

A gang of robbers who carried out a £2.6m raid at Heathrow Airport have been jailed for a total of 25 years.
Security guard Sundeep Sidhu, 22, said he was the victim of an armed raid as he drove off with the foreign currency consignment while working at the airport.

But suspicious officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad placed Sidhu and his brother Harjit, 25, under surveillance and uncovered a plot to steal the money.

Sidhu, of Norwood Green, west London, pleaded guilty to theft and was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison.

Lip-reader

Harjit Sidhu, also of Norwood Green, Anil Parmar, 37, of Northolt, west London, and Manish Bhadresa, 23, of Southall, west London, all pleaded guilty to theft and were jailed for five years.

Harbhajan Padda, 33, of, Isleworth, south-west London was also jailed for five years after pleading guilty to handling stolen goods.

Evidence from a lip-reader, employed by detectives to decipher the gang’s conversations filmed by the police, showed Harjit Sidhu bragging that police “haven’t sussed anything”.

One gang member was filmed telling another: “Everybody will get £250,000 – we have got it, it is all over the place”, Kingston Crown Court heard.

Dawn raids

The brothers and three other members of the gang later confessed to the plan after the Flying Squad carried out dawn raids on addresses in west London and found most of the cash, which was in several different currencies.

The court heard that part-time employee Sundeep Sidhu was given permission to help collect a consignment arriving on a South African Airways flight from Johannesburg.

Along with a supervisor, he drove to Stand 34 at Terminal One to meet the flight, and two silver cash boxes were unloaded from the plane into the van.

Ken Millett, prosecuting, said: “To the surprise of the security vehicle that was following the van the vehicle suddenly drove off.

“Sidhu was later to claim that two Asian males appeared from nowhere in the rear of the vehicle, threatened him with knives and told him to drive the van out of the airport.”

FROM BBC NEWS.