"If you told me the SAS did this, I'd believe you": Bike shop loses almost all stock in staggering break-in "like Hatton Garden heist"

"We're still here. We're still going. We're still selling bikes."

That's the resolute message from the owner of C6 Bikes in Cambridgeshire, the cycle shop having been victims of an extraordinarily organised targeted break-in 11 months ago, a burglary which saw 90 per cent of stock taken and left the business fighting to claim insurance money due to the lack of any trace left by the thoroughness of the raid.

"If you told me the SAS fast-roped out a helicopter and did this, I would believe you," owner Steve Heathcock told road.cc, before going on to explain how the perpetrators, who have not been caught, stole £200,000 worth of high-end bikes, kit and components without being caught on CCTV.

During the break-in overnight on the 23rd October 2023 the shop, located on an industrial estate just off the A10 in Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire, was targeted in a meticulous raid by organised criminals displaying what Steve called a "baffling" level of knowledge about the building and shop's layout and security.

"If you watch that documentary on the Hatton Garden robbery, they essentially did the same thing to get into that place," he said, adding that his insurers "still don't believe me, I don't think".

"You see stuff where someone turns up with a Ranger Rover and drives into the front window, it's a smash and grab and off you go. But when we walked in, it looked like someone had moved us out."

> Bike shop targeted in "lawless" raid attempt, major damage as car rammed into building twice

The burglars avoided being picked up on CCTV throughout and began by scaling their way onto the 10-metre-high roof to cut through the building's point of sight broadband wire.

"They waited an hour, came back, and cut a hole in the side of the building. Again, they knew exactly where to cut a hole. There's only one square metre on the ground floor that's unobstructed that you could actually come into, but they knew where that was," Steve continued. "So they came in through that, and then once they were in, they somehow got right across the other side of the building, because the alarm control unit is on the opposite wall, without setting off anything.

"Then they disarmed the alarm completely and got around all the anti-tamper on the case. We've got a fogging device in there as well, so when the alarm sounds it fills a place with disco smoke in 20 seconds. They knocked that out as well. Then, once they did that, they had time to cut all the locks off the roller shutters. They basically rolled the roller shutters off, we think. We don't know, because they avoided all the CCTV on the site, and there's only one road in or out of the site, but somehow they've got in and avoided all the CCTV. They're not on CCTV anywhere.

"We think they rolled the shutters up, backed a van in, moved two tonnes of anti-ram raid to the other side of the door somehow, filled the van up, and drove off."

Such was the professionalism of the job, when Steve arrived with an alarm engineer on Monday morning, thinking the alarm had lost comms as the broadband often goes down at the site, there was nothing to suggest a burglary had even taken place. It was only when he got in that he found the shop still "pristine", but missing almost everything.

"If you told me the SAS did this, I would believe you"

"Every single bike had gone, plus their pick of the customer bikes we had in the workshop," Steve said. "Trek Madones, all the highest stuff. We had to replace six customer bikes, every single stock bike we had. Cannondale SuperSix Evos, Trek Domanes, Trek Madones, Orange e-bikes, Santa Cruz mountain bikes, Cannondale mountain bikes, everything. All the Fox clothing, helmets, all the high-end groupsets like eTap, Red eTap, all the high-end parts and accessories, they knew exactly what they were getting.

"If you told me the SAS fast-roped out a helicopter and did this, I would believe you. Because of the way they disarmed that alarm, you can't even open the case without setting the anti-tamper trigger off. They knew where the anti-tamper trigger was on that case. They knew it had to peel up a specific corner. The alarm engineer said to me, 'I don't think I could have done this without setting it off, I don't know how they did it'.

"There was a perfect 50cm square cut in the side of the wall. Just real precise, clean, like Ocean's Eleven type stuff. Super neat. No mess anywhere, no destruction, just super precise. We couldn't believe it and the insurance company couldn't believe it.

"We had two guys dressed like Ray Mears turn up and they were like, 'Oh yeah, the insurance company employed us, we're going to find out what happened here'. I was like, 'What? What do you mean find out what happened? They've been in and taken all of our bikes'. So the insurance company called us and said, 'It's like an inside job'. None of us are clever enough to pull that off."

Ultimately, after much stress, C6 Bikes has been paid for the lost stock, stolen customers' bikes and business interruption, despite some uncertainty when the business interruption payments were halted, that after a five-month wait for liability to be accepted.

However, Steve points out the claim is "still not resolved" completely, and he was also unimpressed with the police's response to the burglary.

"The police weren't interested," he suggested. "I haven't so much as seen a police officer. Forensics turned up on day one and that was it. I've been out to alarm faults two or three weeks after the incident and called the police to say, 'Look, I'm worried about this, I'm on my own. Can the police officer meet me there or do a drive by or something?'

"And they're like, 'No, we don't need to come out for that'. So they say, 'Can you check it out? And if you see a crime happening, phone us'. So I've literally got to take my life and law into my own hands to protect my business.

"It's been really, really difficult. The shop's full again, but we're still living under the cloud of what's happened and the orders that we've had to refund and not be able to fulfil. It's brutal. Absolutely brutal."

However, in an admirable show of perseverance Steve is determined for it to be "a good news story".

"We know that we're still here. We're coming back better and stronger. We just need support of our customers and the local cycling community, national cycling community, more than ever really," he said.

"We're still here. We're still going. We're still selling bikes. I've had to put some of my own money in it. We've had to fight for the insurance money. It's one of those things, you can let it beat you or you use it as, first of all, to learn from for your security and day-to-day operation. Use it as a bit of a hard reset to look at the business in terms of what you're doing, do something differently going forward and then try and come back bigger and better."