Increasingly targeted these days, the areas of Sintra and Cascais saw two ATM machines ‘blown up’ in the space of 24 hours over Christmas. The first attack involved the injection of gas into an ATM attached to a bank in São João do Estoril in the early hours of Christmas Eve morning.
Thieves made off with the contents, which suggests that warning notices on multibanco machines – saying notes will be soiled with ink if the machine is tampered with – are not to be taken too seriously. Later the same day, four masked men burst into a cake shop in Rio de Moura, Sintra, where the second ATM was located and detonated it with explosives. Correio da Manhã writes that the thieves took off in a dark-coloured car with “a tray full of money”. Police are working on the possibility that both heists could be connected.
