The man, who turned out to be an investigator of the economic protection department, could have stolen millions of forints in previous robberies. The policeman, who was arrested on Wednesday, has confessed to one of the robberies, the Central Investigating Prosecutor’s Office told MTI on Thursday.
The robber entered a bank in Pécs on May 12, 2020, around 3 pm, shortly before closing time. He said he was armed and demanded money, then fled the scene after the robbery. No one was injured in the incident. Witnesses described the man as a calm, communicative, intelligent man with good local knowledge.
The Prosecutor General’s Office announced that according to well-founded suspicion, the man had also committed a robbery in the same bank in November 2019, but he did not admit this during his interrogation, only the robbery in 2020. The perpetrator could have walked away with several million forints in both cases. In the incident in 2020, the man pocketed approximately HUF 5.7 million (more than EUR 15,000), Telex reports.
After the robbery, in November 2020, he logged into the police records system, where he exceeded his authority by deliberately searching for the case file of the robbery, and downloading documents from it in order to illegally obtain information about the status of the investigation. Before his arrest, the man, who had worked in the local police’s economic protection department, also took his service pistol and the six rounds of ammunition that came with it from his duty station without permission to keep in his possession. According to the information, the suspect confessed to these offenses.
Szabad Pécs reports that the man was taken into custody on Wednesday. In addition to the two robberies in Pécs, it is not excluded that he could be the perpetrator in a case in Budapest, nor that the man in question has now been identified in connection with the Budapest case, the website writes.
Szabad Pécs spoke to a person who had a professional relationship with the policeman arrested today and suspected of three bank robberies. He said that he was completely overwhelmed by the news that we approached him with and that he could not imagine what had led him to do this, if it was indeed the policeman arrested on Wednesday. The source said that he knew the policeman to be a decent, professionally respected, good-hearted policeman, and if he was the perpetrator, he said he must have had very serious financial difficulties, but the person who spoke anonymously and who knew the policeman only through a professional relationship, also said that he did not know of any such problems with the man in custody.
Featured photo by Tamás Sóki/MTI
