Dramatic footage shows ATM being ripped from wall with stolen digger

Dramatic footage shows the moment an ATM was ripped from a wall with a stolen digger.

The CCTV footage shows men wearing balaclavas attacking the shop at 4.15am in Dungiven, Co Londonderry.

One man operated the digger, smashing the building and brickwork around the cash machine, while the other two men watched on during the raid, the eight ATM theft in the region this year.

Once extracted from the wall, the thieves lowered the ATM into a Citroen Berlingo van which had its roof cut off and drove away, with the safe protruding out of the top of the vehicle.

The machine was forcibly removed from outside the filling station on the Feeny Road.

In tactics similar to previous attacks, the thieves used a digger stolen from a nearby work site to rip the ATM from the wall.

Last week, police said that several criminal gangs were behind the series of the raids, with paramilitaries potentially cashing in on some of the ill-gotten gains.

Shop owner Martin O'Kane surveyed the damage from behind a police cordon on Sunday afternoon.

"The men who did this are just scumbags," he said. "There are going to be less and fewer ATMs about now because of these attacks. There is one basically happening every week now.

"I probably won't get another cash machine in again - and that will be the local community losing out."