A travel agency in Argentina recently had the misfortune of being robbed twice in one day, once by a couple of aggressive robbers and then by the police officers that were supposed to catch the criminals, not copy them.

Last Wednesday, two armed robbers entered the offices of a travel agency in Buenos Aires and brutalized the staff before running off with hundreds of thousands of pesos. The victims called the police as soon as the assailants left the premises, but that proved to be a big mistake. In about 10 minutes, three police officers arrived on the scene, and after a brief interrogation of the staff regarding the robbery, they stormed off after the criminals. That’s when one of the agency’s employees noticed that a black bag containing about 4 million pesos that the robbers had missed was nowhere to be found…

Photo: Maxim Hopman/Unsplash

One of the travel agency’s employees swore that the robbers had missed the bag and that it was still in the office when the police arrived. He wasn’t lying. CCTV footage showed one of the police officers casually walking out of the agency with the bag under their arm. At this point, the travel agency boss was convinced that there had been some mistake and that the officer had taken the bag as evidence.  He was wrong!

After calling the police station to report the missing bag of money, the owner of the agency was told by the operator that the procedural record put together by the police officers didn’t mention any bag of money. That’s when the agency staff started considering the possibility that the policemen that came after the robbers just finished the job instead of helping them.

After reviewing the security camera footage, a prosecutor demanded the arrest of the three police officers and that they be brought before a judge. CCTV videos show the three officers taking the stairs down from the seventh-floor travel agency even though there was a more comfortable elevator. Investigators concluded that the three noticed security cameras inside the elevator, and preferred to avoid them, not accounting for the cameras in the lobby.

“They saw that there were cameras in the elevator and for that reason, they preferred to avoid them, but they did not take into account those in the corridors,” a source involved in the investigation told Infobae.

 

The three officers were detained this week, and the black bag full of dollars was found in one of the suspect’s homes. The other two people denied playing a part in the unexpected robbery, claiming that they never considered their colleague a criminal. The three police officers are currently detained in different facilities of the Federal police and will remain so until the investigation is concluded.