Acetylene lack foils P50M rob

P50 million burglary bonanza for beauty salon workers and their boyfriends came six inches of solid steel short yesterday after the fuel of their cutting torch used on the vault of an adjacent pawnshop ran out, leaving them with nothing but an incriminating hole.

Manila police probers are now trying to determine the names of some one dozen men and women who cut a hole from their adjacent salon into a Cebuana Lhuiller pawnshop to cut open its walk-in vault. Investigators said some P50 million of jewels were stored in the multi-door, five-by-three-feet safe.

"It appears that they merely ran out of acetylene. They needed more to cut through that vault," Ermita police investigator Police Officer 3 Renato Garay told The STAR.

The break-in was discovered at 9 a.m. yesterday after pawnshop employees reported for duty and found the hole in the wall, their vault mangled, and their office in disarray. The Cebuana Lhuiller pawnshop and the Les Mari beauty salon both rent their premises along A. Mabini street, near corner Solano street in Ermita.

Garay said only some six-inches of solid steel separated the thieves from the loot.

Garay said the drilling and the cutting must have occurred between 10 p.m. Saturday and 6 a.m. yesterday, when the group began leaving the salon. One of the suspects, a male, however, stayed on until 8 a.m. until the pawnshop’s guard Rizalino Martinez, 38, arrived.

But it was not until 9 a.m. that pawnshop appraiser Rowena Simaco, 31, and three other employees arrived to open the shop and discovered the attempted robbery.

"According to the occupants of the other units, the salon employees and their boyfriends were inside their shop all night drinking liquor," said Garay. He said the torch destroyed the locking system of the vault so that the pawnshop employees could not open it yesterday.

Garay said the frustrated thieves had to make do with some pens and office supplies, the only things found missing in the ransacked pawnshop. – Jose Aravilla