SIX men armed with handguns and assault rifles overpowered two guards before robbing the MTN store at the Coastlands Gatemax centre on Umhlanga Rocks Drive on Friday morning. Thousands of Rands’ worth of phones were stolen in the daring heist. The incident occurred at about 2.45am, said Lt Raymond Deokaran, spokesman for the Durban North SAPS.

“The men arrived in a black Golf GTI and overpowered the guard at the boom gate. They turned their attention to another guard who was patrolling near Coastlands Hotel and the receptionist at the hotel. They were all forced to lie on the ground under watch by the armed men. One of the suspects then took a crowbar out the vehicle and forced the doors of the store open.

“At this point the store is doing a stocktake to see what was taken but the armed men removed a number of items before fleeing the scene. We were able to trace the number plate of the suspects’ vehicle and found they had cloned them,” he said.

Deokaran added that there were at least two other MTN stores targeted this year by a group of armed men. At the beginning of this month, an MTN store in Tongaat was robbed. The suspects tied up and gagged three staff members in the storeroom, helped themselves to a large quantity of iPhones and emptied the till of cash.

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