Police arrest bank heist suspect after manhunt

The police said Saturday it has arrested a suspect in an armed bank robbery that took place in a southeastern county two days earlier.

The Gyeongsan Police Station in North Gyeongsang Province said it caught a 43-year-old man, identified only by his last name Kim, at a parking lot of a large accommodation facility in Danyang, North Chungcheong Province, at around 6:47 p.m.

 

(Captured from CCTV footage)

Police had suspected the robber may be a foreigner as one of the bank employees claimed he had a poor Korean accent, but it turned out that he was a native.

Kim is suspected of robbing a branch of the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation, also known as Nonghyup, in a county in Gyeongsan early Thursday, threatening the employees at gunpoint and fleeing the scene on a bicycle with some 15.6 million won ($13,700) in cash, all of which took him only four minutes.

During the heist, he apparently fired one shot from what the police believe to be a homemade gun, but no one was hurt as it was aimed at the wall.

Police said they followed his tracks based on the surveillance footage retrieved from the crime scene that showed images of Kim moving the bicycle to a cargo truck.

Kim has apparently admitted the charges against him, saying that he threw out the gun and clothes he wore at the time of the heist, the police said.

While holding him in custody, the police plan to investigate the possibility of Kim having any accomplices and how he obtained his gun, they said. (Yonhap)

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