Manhunt for last robber

A nationwide manhunt is under way for the last member of a gang that tried to pull off a £100million gold bullion raid.

The eight-strong gang burst into the Heathrow warehouse to be met by a phalanx of more than 100 Flying Squad officers.

Today all but one of the gang were in custody, with a hunt in progress for the last member.

The raid, which would have dwarfed the £26million Brink's-Mat bullion snatch at Heathrow in 1983, involved dozens of police marksmen who stormed the men as they threatened staff with an array of weapons.

Officers fired a volley of Hatton rounds - bullets designed to deflate the tyres on the robbers' getaway van - before forcing them to surrender.

Six men, all in their thirties, were immediately arrested but amid the confusion two managed to escape by hijacking a van at gunpoint. The men forced the frightened driver to speed away from the scene.

Dozens of police officers followed as the lorry sped along country lanes to Wraysbury, three miles from the warehouse, before crashing into a fence surrounding a reservoir. Both men fled.

One was captured after running off towards a housing estate. The other remains at large.

The raid took place at about 10am, when a white van bearing false number plates rammed through the steel shutters of the Swissport Cargo warehouse in Staines, on the perimeter of Heathrow. Inside the warehouse, eight masked men burst out of the van brandishing handguns.

But having tracked the men during a thorough surveillance operation spanning several weeks, officers from the Met's Flying Squad were lying in wait and ready to pounce.

Detective Superintendent Barry Phillips from the Flying Squad said the audacious raid would have been one of the biggest robberies ever committed in the UK.

"History will show that this is just as significant an attempted robbery in the 21st century as the Great Train Robbery and Brink's-Mat," he said.

But in an astonishing admission, Swissport spokesman Patrick Lennon said that the gang had entered the complex through the main entrance with "legitimate papers".

"Every vehicle that goes through there has to identify themselves to the security officers," he said.