The police arrest Xavier N, the alleged mastermind of the robbery of a jewelry store in the Antara shopping center

The intellectual author of the robbery at the Berger jewelry store, in the Antara shopping center, has been arrested after an exhaustive investigation by the Secretariat of Citizen Security of Mexico City. This was announced this Monday by Omar García Harfuch, the head of the Secretariat, at a press conference that had the objective of showing the progress of a viral robbery, which on June 26 punctured the luxury bubble in which the Polanco neighborhood, one of the richest in the capital, and for which one of the thieves had already been arrested. The case, due to the media attention it has received and the place where the events took place —a shopping center in a privileged neighborhood— has forced the police to work and find the thieves in record time, in a country where that less than 1% are resolved, according to the civil organization Impunidad Cero.

A week ago, four thieves entered the mall separately, to avoid suspicion, and when they got close enough to their target, two of them took out axes and sledgehammers and began to hit the glass of Berger, a luxury jewelry store. The third threatened anyone who dared to come near with a gun. The security officers who protect the place disappeared from the scene and dedicated themselves to waiting, like the store employees, for the thieves to do their job. They took 15 watches valued at a total of 1.8 million pesos.

After a few days, the intellectual author of the crime, the fourth man, the one who was driving the van that was parked on the outskirts of the compound, has been detained by the authorities in the Bondojito neighborhood, in the Gustavo A. Madero Mayor’s Office, who used videos to identify the vehicles used in the assault and trace their location. The first arrest occurred the same day of the robbery, a few hours later. The thieves fled on two motorcycles and a Ford truck to a house on Lago de Xochimilco street, in the Anahuac neighborhood. Marco N. was arrested hours later in possession of a gun, probably the same one he used to scare security guards and customers on the night of the robbery.

After that arrest, two searches were carried out, says García Harfuch, which allowed the authorities to secure the vehicle and the two motorcycles used during the incident, in addition to the mallets and axes that were used to break Berger’s windows. The statements of the first detainee and the police investigations led them to a house in the Bondojito neighborhood, which they kept under surveillance for days, until they obtained the order to enter the home and arrest Xavier N. The mastermind has been arrested this morning in the house that he shared with a woman and in which he had a small drug trafficking business set up.

Xavier had a record for crimes of possession of firearms and dispossession. García Harfuch is committed to the investigation and has assured that they are looking for the other two detainees, while the police continue to collect the testimonies of the jewelry store staff and the security workers of the company that manages the shopping center. At the moment there do not appear to be any links between them and the thieves who rose to fame last week after beating up the Berger jewelry store. In the videos that circulated on the internet, people could be seen locked in luxury stores while, on the floor below, thieves were busy breaking the glass.

The next day everything quickly returned to normal. A black piece of wood covered Berger’s blown-out window and people passed by as if it were part of the decoration, surrounded by police from the Security Secretariat who had come “as reinforcement”, and employees of TotalSafety, the company that the day before , during the robbery, he limited himself to notifying the clients and workers of the adjoining stores to take refuge inside and close the doors, according to what they told this newspaper. “Life goes on,” said a young woman who had come there from the Guerrero neighborhood. There was a campaign for the clothing brand Sephora and they painted the nails for free. “Besides, it’s not something that happens every day,” said the young woman. The rest must have thought the same, because Antara was full of refined people drinking coffee and croissant and families buying clothes at Zara and Adolfo Domínguez.

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