About 30 men stormed a bank on Monday night to Tuesday December 1 with heavy weapons and explosives and exchanged fire with police in a spectacular robbery with hostages in a town from southern Brazil, local police said.
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This outburst of violence woke up with a start the town of Criciuma, 217,000 inhabitants, 200 km south of Florianópolis, capital of the state of Santa Catarina (south).
The loot was not specified and the perpetrators managed to escape.
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It was extremely violent.
Around midnight around 30 delinquents carried out an assault using heavy weapons and explosives
"to open the chests," commissioner Anselmo Cruz of the local police told TV Globo on television.
No death is to be deplored.
A policeman and a security guard were injured.
The robbers blocked several streets in the city center and took hostage workers who were repainting a crosswalk, forcing one of them to transport the loot to the vehicles in which he then fled. , specified the G1 news site.
Police found the abandoned vehicles and were still looking for the attackers in the late morning.
Four people tried to recover 810,000 reais (approximately 128,000 euros) who fell on the road.
They were arrested, but it is not known whether they were linked to the burglars.
Local television broadcast images showing deminers withdrawing in the area of the robbery, with a robot and special suits, some 30 kg of explosives left by the attackers.
The mayor of Criciuma, Clésio Salvaro, asked the inhabitants in the morning on social networks not to go out.
Last July, dozens of assailants terrorized a small town in the interior of Sao Paulo state, Botucatu, with the same kind of bomb heist.
