A cash handling courier got imprisoned in the back of his own van and required four police cars and six officers to get him out – on reportedly his first day at work.
Crowds gathered to laugh at the poor courier’s predicament as his mishap set off deafening attack warning sirens from the Loomis security van outside the Sainsbury’s Local in Deansgate, Manchester.
A passerby was prompted to call 999 as the siren wailed ‘security vehicle under attack, please call the police’ but six officers tried and failed to break out the trapped driver.
Video footage from a passerby shows a colleague of the driver, who arrived a whole hour later, trying to use an emergency key to free the prisoner.
One eyewitness said: “I felt so sorry for him [the man inside the van].
“Everyone has that embarrassing incident on the first day of work, but you don’t really expect for it to happen in front of a crowd of people with a siren blaring out at 60 decibels. But he was sweet and unassuming.
“I spoke to the man who was standing around who made the 999 call. He said that some people had been just there laughing at it and he made the call because the message had said to do.
“Police officers had arrived at the scene by 3.10pm. There were six of them. They tried the doors first but the siren would just keep getting louder and they couldn’t get in.
“Then they made up a sort of knocking system to see if the man inside was okay. Eventually they got one knock from inside, so they knew he was just trapped.
“They were just shouting at the van, ‘Knock once for you are trapped but you’re okay, knock twice for something else happened.”
As the saga progressed and it became evident the police could not break the courier out of the van, Loomis was contacted to send back up.
The red-faced captive was unleashed from the van to meet a round of applause and jeers a whole hour later, after another Loomis driver came to the rescue.
“When he got out of the van he answered the police’s questions and then quickly darted back into the van with his colleague,” said the eyewitness.
“As he went by I just asked if he was okay, and he said, ‘Just really embarrassed.”
A second eyewitness said: “What I found so funny about the whole thing was when the police established their knocking system. They just seemed utterly perplexed about what to do.
“At first when one of them tried the door, the rest of them just stood back, and then when one officer came up with the idea of knocking. As he did it they stood back, almost like they revered him.
“Then, the officer when up to his boss, and said, ‘sir, I’ve established that the man is safe and well and that he is trapped inside’.
“They were just completely confounded.”
A Greater Manchester Police spokesperson said: “We received a call at 2.55pm out to an alarm sounding in a vehicle on Deansgate. Officers attended the scene. There was nothing criminal reported about the incident.”
A Loomis spokesperson said: “Delivering cash in the UK is a complex business utilising ever-evolving technologies. On this occasion the crew were caught out by new technology that they were unable to override from inside the vehicle.
“For operational and security reasons we cannot go into detail but at no time was the safety of anyone in jeopardy and the crew emerged unharmed shortly afterwards.”
