A couple scared away a trio of armed and masked robbers from their holiday home near Quinta do Lago earlier this month.
“It was a fight of around one minute, until the robbers got away,” Scottish holidaymaker Stewart Stringer told Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã, adding that he and his Dutch wife Maria José “were very lucky”.
The couple were sitting down for dinner with Maria José’s parents in the house when they felt the presence of someone and suddenly all of the lights went out.
According to Maria José, three robbers appeared and said “we have guns and we will fire,” which led to a reaction from them all to fight back.
“My father hit one of them and my husband and I tried to remove the masks from the other two,” she said.
The three robbers fled the property and the PJ police are now investigating this crime.
Meanwhile, three men were caught red-handed by the GNR for burgling a house in Monte Lemos, Praia da Luz earlier this month.
A GNR patrol, which was sent to the property following a call from the alarm company, caught one man who tried to run away on foot and seized the burglars’ getaway car, in which 22 doses of cannabis and 230 euros in cash were also found.
According to the GNR, a police search of the suspect’s house in Messines led to the recovery of a range of items including televisions, computers, knives and crow bars.
In another crime incident, a stolen digger was once again used to break into a bank and take an ATM machine, this time in the village of Ameixal in Loulé in the early hours of February 5.
According to Correio da Manhã, the cash machine had been installed in the village in January and had been refilled only two days prior to the theft.
PJ police are investigating this latest in a growing number of ATM machine thefts in the region, for which no suspects have yet been detained. E.W.
