Hunt continues for Pink Panther jewel thieves

Interpol say they are tightening the net around the Pink Panther gang, a group of 150 eastern European criminals who carry out undeniably glamorous robberies across the world. The chief of a multi-national police task force told the Guardian yesterday that he is closing in on the gang's hideouts in the mountains of Montenegro.

The Pink Panthers have carried out some 152 robberies in jewellery shops since 2002 alone, though they are thought to have been in operation since the late 1990s. They have struck in Tokyo, Berne, London, Monte Carlo, St Tropez and Dubai – and their raids are distinguished by their efficiency and style.

Always targeting the most upscale shops for uber-luxurious jewellery and £65,000 watches, the Pink Panthers first made the headlines in the UK – and earned their nickname – when they robbed the Graff jewellers on New Bond Street in 2003.

That raid went wrong, with one member of the gang captured by a security guard. But its execution was typical of their usual modus
operandi. Two men in smart suits and wigs, carrying umbrellas to hide from CCTV, walked into the shop and produced a large magnum pistol and a hammer.

Within three minutes they had taken 47 pieces of diamond jewellery worth £23m. One man then fled the scene on a motor scooter with most of the loot – and was not captured.

His accomplice, Nebojsa Denic, was not so lucky. Security man Simon Stearman, a Falklands veteran, risked his life as Denic fired on him – missing - to wrestle the thief to the ground, where he held him until police arrived.

Four years later, a robbery in Tokyo was startlingly similar in its execution. Two European men in elegant suits entered a jewellery shop and produced a pistol. Just 36 seconds later, after firing a burst of tear gas at staff, the men walked out – with the Comtesse de Vendôme, a £17m necklace studded with 116 diamonds.

Incredibly, they made their getaway on bicycles. Interpol believe the necklace has almost certainly been disassembled, its diamonds re-cut and sold, its gold melted down.

In another colourful raid that year in Dubai, two Audi saloons – one white, one black – were driven through the luxury Wafi mall to ram-raid a shop. Men in black balaclavas jumped out, grabbed £1.9m-worth of jewellery, and coolly made their escape in the same vehicles.

There is an aura of glamour around these crimes – as there was around the successful springing of gang member Dragan Mikic from a prison at Villefranche-sur-Saône in France when his colleagues fired Kalashnikovs on the prison tower.

The gang's romantic image is heightened by the fact that they are not known to have killed anybody during their raids – and by suggestions that their origins in the troubled former Yugoslavia hint at poverty, making their crimes a necessity.

But when the New Yorker's David Samuels wrote a comparatively sympathetic piece about the Pink Panthers, he received a sobering public riposte from Interpol.

Pietry Calcaterra – the chief of Interpol's Pink Panthers unit – wrote: "The victim is not the man wielding the gun, however colourful his alleged derring-do. The victim in an armed robbery is the person lying on a shop floor with a gun pointed at his head." ·