Two masked men rob an optician’s in Los Alcázares

This week, the optical company Óptica Óptima was robbed twice, once in the Elche suburb of La Marina and again in the municipality of Los Alcázares. The Guardia Civil is looking into whether the same group of thieves did both robberies. They wore hoods and different clothes. The retailers are still figuring out how much they lost, but it should be a lot because many expensive glasses were stolen.

The Óptica Óptima company, which has around thirty stores in the provinces of Alicante and Murcia, has been robbed twenty times in less than three years. The extra security measures have failed to stop the thieves, including the smoke system designed to prevent theft, as shown in CCTV footage from the looted stores.

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On Tuesday, January 27th, around 3:30 a.m., a robbery happened at the Óptima optician shop in La Marina. There is a security shutter and a security glass door at the store. The door also has bars to keep people from breaking in. Even with these precautions, the criminals broke the security glass with a sledgehammer. After that, two people in hoods went inside to hide their identity.

Three minutes to rob

For around three minutes, two burglars grabbed a lot of pairs of spectacles. They didn’t pay attention to the alarm and left before the police got there. We don’t know if the two had someone waiting in a car outside the optician’s store to help them get away.

Another robbery happened at a different branch of this optician chain in Los Alcázares just before 5:00 a.m. after this one. The two shops are around 60 km apart, and it takes about an hour to go there. This means that the same group might have done it.

In the Los Alcázares robbery, nevertheless, three guys broke into the business wearing various outfits, as shown by the surveillance camera footage. No matter what, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that they broke into two stores owned by the same corporation on the same night.

The robbery in La Marina lasted around three minutes, whereas the one in Los Alcázares took almost two. The robbers broke into the shop by slamming a car into the window. Once inside, they even broke the glass in the display cases to steal expensive, designer spectacles.

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An inventory is being made to figure out how much was stolen and how much damage was done to the optical shops since the two thefts. The company that was broken into was going to tell the Guardia Civil in Santa Pola about the two robberies so that they could look into them. Grupo Óptima had not experienced a robbery in almost a year. The latest one happened in February of last year at one of their establishments in Playa de San Juan.

Author: Derek Appleton