Crime
Activist robs bank, insists it’s for just cause as security agents pursue
Sali Hafiz is not a thief, but she had to rob a bank on Wednesday, and she did it successfully, hauling out bagfuls of dollars.
No life lost.
Her story hit Twitter and other social media platforms, making her a hero of sorts in Beirut, Lebanon.
She even streamed the roll herself, thereby grabbing the opportunity to explain why a good girl turned a badass, and pulled off a heist in which the only thing lost was broken glass. She and her accomplice had to get out of Blom Bank they raided.
Hafiz said her sister is sick, down with cancer, and needs treatment.
“I came today… to take the deposits of my sister who is dying in hospital,” she said in the video in the banking hall she already drenched in gasoline.
“I did not come to kill anyone or to start a fire… I came to claim my rights.”
In a later interview with a Lebanese broadcaster after the raid, Hafiz said she got $13,000 of the $20,000 her family had deposited. But the sick sister needs $50,000.
And she claimed, too , she was armed with a toy gun she got from her nephew.
She’s on the run now, and her family has distanced themselves from her robbery.
Blom Bank has witnessed incidents of depositors storming its branches to forcibly withdraw their trapped savings since the Lebanese ran their economy aground years back.
