A man has been rescued after he got trapped in a tunnel in central Rome that he was allegedly excavating in an attempt to rob a bank.
It took firefighters eight hours to free the man, who was buried six meters deep after part of a road collapsed on Via Inocenzo XI, near the Vatican.
Emergency services were alerted after receiving a call from one of the four alleged gang members who managed to escape the collapsed tunnel Thursday morning.
A voice was revealed from under the rubble, and as rescuers carried out the complicated operation by digging a parallel hole to reach the man, he repeatedly shouted, “Help me, I beg you to get me out,” Italian media reports.
The man, who was given liquid food and an oxygen cylinder to help him breathe, was eventually pulled alive to long applause from a large crowd that had gathered to watch.
Police said he was taken to hospital and is reported to have critical but not life-threatening injuries.
A police spokesman told AFP that two people from Naples were arrested for resisting a public official and two people from Rome on charges of damaging public property. We are still investigating. We do not rule out that they are thieves. “It’s one of the theories,” he said.
Police told local media that the man, who is from Rome, had previously been convicted of theft, as had the four other alleged gang members, all of whom were arrested.
Police believe they were digging into the tunnel, which began under a closed shop, to reach the vault of a nearby bank.
They allegedly excavated a little each day so that they could carry out their heist on the state holiday of Ferragosto on Monday, an Italian holiday similar to Christmas, taking advantage of the bank closure and Rome being almost deserted.
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