Ram raiders attempted to steal a cash machine from a Suffolk village supermarket this morning by backing a stolen 4x4 vehicle into the main entrance.
The incident took place just before 2am at the Co-op store in The Street, Rickinghall, near Diss, and is the latest in a string of similar raids across Suffolk, Norfolk and north Essex.
A Mitsubishi L200 pick-up was reversed through the main entrance of the building in an unsuccessful attempt to remove the cash machine from inside.
Police said three males then made off in a silver BMW X5 – which may have been stolen following a burglary at a property in Acton, near Sudbury, sometime between November 16 and December 2 – in the direction of the A140.
Officers, with assistance from a National Police Air Service helicopter, searched the area following the raid, but the offenders were not located.
The Mitsubishi vehicle used to ram the building was left behind at the scene and was also stolen from an address in nearby Hopton early yesterday morning.
One woman living nearby told how she was woken by the car being driven into the shop.
“We heard lots of shouting and the crashing noise from a car,” she said.
“It woke us at about 1.50am but all you could hear was people shouting with loads of banging noises.
“It was the middle of the night and a few times at the weekend there may be people walking down the street so I assumed it was somebody making a lot of noise.
“It took me a bit of time to realise that the noise was actually coming from the shop.”
The attempted theft follows a number of raids on Co-op stores and there have been at least 13 such incidents across Suffolk and north Essex in the past 18 months alone.
The Co-op said last month that it has “invested heavily” in its security services, including a state-of-the-art Alarm Receiving Centre to monitor more than 6,000 CCTV cameras around the clock.
Any witnesses, or anyone with information about the ram raid or the thefts of the vehicles involved, is asked to contact West CID at Bury St Edmunds Police Station on 101 quoting reference 77566/17, or independent crime fighting charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.
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