BURGLAR'S COUP.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 154, 29 June 1907, Page 13

BURGLAR'S COUP.

CHEMISTRY AND CRIME. Cash and securities to the value of £4000 were stolen in Antwerp on the night of May 13th by a burglar who displayed the most amazing ingenuity In gaining access to a safe and ransacking its contents. The victims were a firm of stockbrokers, Messrs Glabbeek and Van Laet, whose offices form part of the Term inns Hotel building, in the Rue Pelican. The previous evening a traveller arrived at the hotel, and signed his name as Lagasse. He insisted on having a front room, and secured one over the stockbrokers' office. He asked lor ulenty of water, as he wished to have a bath. He then went out, returning soon after with valises which are now known to have contained carefully packed carboys of oxygen.

When the hotel was quiet he stopped the , keyholes of the adjoining rooms, removed his bed, cut the carpet, drilled holes in the flooring, sawed through the planks, and broke the plaster celling of the room below, having previously placed an inverted umbrella to prevent the planter falling to the floor. Next he descended through the hole into the office by a rope ladder screwed to the bedroom floor. He carefully covered all apertures In the office with blankets bought during the evening, and erected a -kind of screen round the safe. Pouring his bathwater on a quantity of calcium carbide, be made acetylene gas, and by burning it with oxygen produced such intense heat that he soon melted the steel of the safe and the lock yielded. The 6afe was doubly fastened, so that he was obliged to repeat this part of his work. He then emptied the safe and thoroughly ransacked the whole office. Returning to the bedroom by his rope ladder, he replaced the bed and the carpet, set all in order, and departed at five o'clock in the morning with only a small handbag, telling the hotel porter that he was making an excursion and would return at midday.

No sound of his night's work was heard, and it was only when the employees came to open the office that the burglary was discovered. The office was a scene of the wildest confusion. The burglar had left everything behind—acetylene machine, oxygen carboys, electric lamps, gloves, smoked spectacles, and other articles.

Two Germans who arrived at the saice time as ••Lagasso'' and occupied a room over his are believed to have been his accomplices. They are thought to be mem bers of a gang of International thieves.