Staff members at Willy’s supermarket in Vara confronted the pair last Sunday, but were taken by surprise when they suddenly jumped from their chairs and ran for the door.

After the thieves made their speedy getaway leaving one of the wheelchairs behind, a secret compartment packed with stolen coffee was discovered. It is not clear whether the men escaped with other concealed goods.

“We are labelling this as robbery; a very sophisticated attempt,” Ulf Lörstad, spokesman of Vara county, told the Göteborgsposten (GP) newspaper.

Police are confident that the men, believed to be in the thirties, will still be caught thanks to evidence left behind in the form of the jettisoned wheelchair.

“We’ll be making a forensic investigation. Hopefully there will be traces, and if the men are in our register, then it will be hard for them to deny this crime,” Lörstad told the paper.

He added, however, that the unusually large exhibit was complicated to process. “The wheelchair didn’t fit into our response car, so the youngest member of our force was given the task of wheeling it back to the station,” Lörstad said.

On Tuesday two men, aged 22 and 23, a 19 year-old woman and a 14 year-old girl were arrested following more that 100 tip-offs to police. Pictures of the suspects using Damsgaard’s ATM card were circulated in the press, leading to the breakthrough.

One of the men and the older woman were taken in to custody at a Frederiksberg address, while the teenager and the other man were apprehended a few blocks away. It is believed that the men have lived in Sweden for around a year, but the relationship between the four suspects is not yet known.

Police investigator Charlotte Skovby confirmed that the men have been charged with murder and robbery, while the legal status of the two women is yet to be determined.

All stolen goods from the armed robbery of the Michelsen watch shop on 17th October were found in a British-registered car yesterday. The car had been well-prepared to take the watches out of Iceland, as they were hidden all over the vehicle. 49 watches were stolen in the raid and their value was estimated at ISK 50-70 million (EUR 313,000-438,000), Visir.is reported.

Four Polish men are thought to have visited Iceland especially to plan and carry out the raid. One of the men was arrested in Reykjavik yesterday at the same time as the car was seized. The other three men left the country by air on the 18th — less than a day after the robbery. They had arrived by plane a week earlier.

The man who was arrested yesterday did not directly participate in the robbery. His job was to get the loot out of the country. He had arrived on the Norrona ferry from Denmark two or three days after his accomplices and apparently intended to use the ferry to get the stolen goods out of Iceland.

The men used four cars in the heist: three which had been stolen in Iceland and the British registered one — chosen to throw police off the Polish men’s tail.

All four of the Poles are in their thirties and police yesterday told reporters that they had a very good idea who had committed the robbery just two days after it occurred. The three free criminals are now being looked for in mainland Europe and if they are arrested, they will be extradited to Iceland.

Icelandic police do not know of any connections the men may have to Iceland and do not believe any of them had spent much (or any) time in the country before. They are now investigating whether they have committed other similar crimes in other countries.

The Reykjavik District Court today granted a police request to hold the arrested man in custody for two weeks while the investigation continues.

The statue was unveiled in 2006 and is half of a two-part work. The other half is still in place in Vik i Myrdal, South Iceland.

Thorarinsdottir told RUV that the statues had been placed so as to ‘call out’ over the sea in memory of all the British sailors who have died around the Icelandic coast and to commemorate the strong links between the two nations which have stretched over the sea for a thousand years.

About the theft, she said that five men had been seen and captured on CCTV lugging the statue.

It is unclear whether the thieves’ motive was the value of 300 kilos of bronze, or if there was another, less materialistic reason for their crime.

(Small photo: RUV.is. Large picture: crossed-flag-pins.com)

The auction on the 11th June will start at 11.00 outdoors at Askalind 2a in Kopavogur.

The bicycles being sold off are unclaimed property which has either been stolen and then recovered or simply lost.

According to Visir.is, last year the police received 800 reports of stolen bikes. It is not known what happened to the majority of those; but 200 bikes found their way to the police lost property department during the year.

The police request that people should not just search for their bicycle right after it has been stolen; but they should also come back to the police station several weeks later to see if it has turned up. It is also quite common for bikes to turn up several months after they are stolen.

Bicycle owners are reminded of the importance of storing their bike in a safe place and avoid leaving them unlocked. It is also a good idea to write down and keep the bike’s serial number to make it easier for the police to identify.

According to Helgi Gunnarsson, a Reykjavik police detective, the investigation into the case has already been completed.

All evidence has been collected and forensic testing carried out. Islandsbanki has decided to press charges and the case is in the hands of legal experts.

According to Pressan.is, the man offered to sell an individual several banknotes from the collection — among them a very rare 100 krona Icelandic note from 1904, which is worth as much as ISK 1.5 million (EUR 9,100). There are thought to be no more than six such notes left in Iceland today.

The collector decided to check the note’s ownership before buying and when the serial numbers were compared, he realised it had come from the bank’s collection.

Islandsbanki is in possession of a very valuable numismatic collection which is the sum of the collections of all banks which merged over the decades to form present-day Islandsbanki (formerly Glitnir). They were Verslunarbanki, Utvegsbanki, Althydubanki and Idnadarbanki.

The collector called the police when he realised the origin of the note. The police decided to hold off doing anything until the two men were due to meet to discuss a purchasing price for the artefact. The curator was arrested in a police sting at the meeting.

In 1904, 100 kronur was the highest value note the bank circulated and was enough to buy a horse. For this reason very few were in active circulation and that is why they are so valuable today.

The group targeted Nordiska Guldjuveler, a gold retailer on Sodermalm, on Thursday, where they reportedly completely cleaned shelves of gold products. The robbers were able to enter the property using scaffolding outside to reach a window on the upper level.

The Expressen newspaper spoke with witness Stig Hagstrom, who said that the men were disguised as house painters and their identity was concealed with ski masks. He added that he thought nothing of it until he spotted one of them with a gun. Speaking to Expressen, he said, “I ran straight into the reception area of my office where we have a security guard and asked him to call the police.”

Chief executive of the firm, Thomas Jansson, said that he was threatened with a gun when he returned from a coffee run. He had been surprised after not being let through the security gate as usual upon arrival. He told The Local, “When I was finally let in, it was the robbers that opened the door. They pointed a gun at my chest. It was completely unreal.”

Jansson found staff members forced to lie still on the floor as the robbers looted the premises. They were also told there was an explosive planted in the building so as to allow for more escape time.

A police investigation is underway and the amount of gold missing is estimated to be worth millions of euros. Jansson said, “We don’t know exactly how much is gone but it must have been a considerable amount. They had picked the shop clean.”

The council’s technical and environmental committee agreed last week that a further DEK 500,000 (EUR 67,000) would not be invested in the ill-fated venture. “No, the project will not continue,” Social Democrat council member Lise Thorsen told Jyllands-Posten newspaper. ”We all agreed that it’s pointless to continue the financing of a project that clearly isn’t working.”

Head of the council’s bicycle division, Andreas Rohl, said they soon lost faith in the idea, which was introduced by former mayor Ritt Bierregaard in 2008.

“We thought it was a great experiment, but we soon stopped believing in it. So we stopped installing chips and we also stopped producing scanners for the parking attendants,” he admitted. ”I still have great respect for the idea that a city council experiments to solve problems. But we must admit that this was a wrong judgement call,” Rohl added.

The thief and his accomplice, who survived on just cornflakes and water during their two days spent in the vault last May, made use of plastic bags when nature called. While they managed to get away immediately after the robbery, the decision to discard the bag eventually led to one of the men’s downfall when police were able to identify him from his DNA.

The man was sentenced to 21 months in Jail by a Danish court this week. The 27 year-old admitted hiding in the bank vault but denied planning the heist.

In total, 140 safety deposit boxes were emptied of jewellery and cash. The convicted man’s three accomplices were never caught and the spoils, which amounted to around DKK 2.7 million (EUR 306,000), are still to be recovered.

But Mr Klasson, who was once the sparring partner of former European light-middleweight boxing champ Bo ‘Bosse’ Hogberg, gave the pair a crash-course in respecting their elders while proving that there’s still plenty of fight left in him.

“I said to them, ‘this isn’t going to go well’,” he told Expressen newspaper. When the men scoffed at his warning, he knocked one of them to the floor with a sharp right hook before laying the other out with a left jab. “They came after the wrong guy,” Klasson explained.

Both the thieves fled the scene and Klasson has been praised for fighting his corner.”It was well done. One does have the right to defend oneself,” Margita Johansson of Lidkoping Police told local newspaper NLT.