Burglars looted a large amount of money from the vault of Sonali Bank's Kishoreganj branch Sunday morning, police and bank officials said.
But the exact amount of money taken away by the unidentified miscreants could not be known immediately as the process of ascertaining the figure was continuing till filing of this report.
Confirming the incident, the state-owned bank's Kishoreganj branch manager AKM Humayun Kabir Bhuiyan told the FE on mobile phone that he came to know about the incident from bank officials at about 2:30 pm.
"Then we informed the police of the heist," he said, adding that the burglars tunneled under the vault from a nearby tin-shed residential building at Rothkhola in the district town and looted the money.
"I cannot give the exact figure of the money stolen from the bank's vault right now as the process of ascertaining it is going on," the manager said.
Expressing his surprise, the bank manager said the criminals looted the vault located on the ground floor of the two-storey commercial building in the locality, despite having police protection round the clock.
Talking to the FE, Anwar Hossain Khan, superintendent of police in Kishoreganj, said the police rushed to the spot and cordoned off the bank.
"No employees of the branch were allowed to get out as we're questioning them to ascertain the reason," the district police chief said.
He said the police had also been looking for a man of the tin-shed building, from where the underground tunnel was dug.
Mr Khan said: "Our preliminary inspection found that the vault remained unbroken and the cash was kept on a nearby table of the bank vault."
When asked, the police superintendent said the bank officials informed him that the amount of money missing from the bank could be as high as Tk 140 million (14 crore). Initially, the bank authorities claimed the amount of money looted could have been around Tk 120 million.
Earlier the state-owned bank was in focus after investigators of the Bangladesh Bank had found that nearly Tk 40 billion had been disbursed in loans unlawfully to the Hallmark Group.
Following an inquiry, the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) had lodged several cases against the bank's senior officials and owners of the Hallmark Group over the largest-ever loan scandal in the banking sector.
The loan scam put the country's largest state-owned commercial bank, in terms of branches and transactions, under pressure. It was a burning issue among the local analysts and policy makers.
