Police attend Apple Store Covent Garden © Rob Shoesmith
The Apple Store in London’s Covent Garden, currently the largest in the world, was raided by a motorcycle gang in the early hours of Monday morning. Around seven moped and motorbike riders were involved in the burglary, most with a pillion passenger, and escaped with goods likely to be worth thousands of pounds after breaking windows, according to Metropolitan Police.
Rob Shoesmith, a marketing executive and blogger who is currently camping outside the store to head the queue for the iPhone 4S, posted at 1:15am:
[T]he Apple Store in Covent Garden has just been raided!
Woke up to hear a load of motor bikes zoom in and then a smash and grab.
Alarm going off and police have just got here!
A Metropolitan Police statement confirmed the raid, saying:
Shortly afterwards Islington police saw a moped and followed and attempted to stop it, but it was lost.
A moped was subsequently found abandoned in the vicinity of Wyclif Court, St John Street EC1 – officers saw two men inside the block of flats, and they were pursued on foot and apprehended within the block at approx 01.20hrs.
Some property, believed stolen from the store, was found in bags in their possession.
Two men, aged 16 and 21, have been arrested and remain in police custody. Due to the security-conscious layout of the store, with the more portable iPhones and iPads towards the back, most of the stolen items are likely to have been MacBooks, but iPads were also taken, according to police.
Wycliff Court, Brunswick Estate, Finsbury, London (Wikimaps/Google Maps)
Pictures of the scene on Monday morning posted by tech news site The Next Web showed a boarded-up window at the store. The photographer, Samuel Clarke, reported that Apple security staff were preventing further photography and keeping pedestrians away from the store front.
Apple is believed to have seen a significant number of thefts from its stores, including an armed robbery at the San Francisco outlet, and was reported to be working with the FBI to improve security. One of the first Apple Stores, in New York’s SoHo district, suffered a $200,000 robbery shortly after its opening in 2002. In April 2011, an intruder at the Chula Vista, California Apple Store was shot and killed by a security guard.
