Sleeping residents in Cernache (Coimbra) were woken with a blast so powerful in the early hours of Monday morning that it was “heard 2kms away”. The entire building housing an ATM machine was destroyed and five hooded men “seen fiddling with cables minutes before” got away with drawer-loads of cash before police arrived. “It was a terrible shock”, one resident told Correio da Manhã.
“I thought the whole house was going to fall down”.
Many properties had windows blown in, and for now no-one seems to know who is going to pay for the damage.
Attacks on ATM machines by thieves using pumped gas have been used up and down the country.
PJ police are investigating.
The amount of money lost in this latest heist is unknown, but previous attacks have netted as much as €40,000 a pop.
