Downtown merchants want security measures stepped up to prevent another heist on the scale of that which occurred last week at a Rolex outlet. The chairman of downtown organisation believes special focus needs to be placed on immigrants from eastern Europe, with his group making untrue assertions about eastern Europe in general..
As reported, last week three thieves staged a daring daytime heist of the watch store Michelsen. Rolex watches worth millions of crowns were stolen, and the suspects (one of whom is shown above) are still at large. It has been suspected that the thieves were foreign, as employees said they were speaking English to each other. Professor of criminology at the University of Iceland Helgi Gunnlaugsson added that he felt the crime was too well organised to have been committed by Icelanders.
The nationalities of the suspects remains largely beside the point to many downtown merchants, who have asked for stepped-up security measures. They have asked that police officers be more visible downtown as beat cops, and that emergency buttons be more widespread.
Jakob Frímann Magnússon – probably best known as the keyboardist for Icelandic pop band Stuðmenn – is also the director of Our Downtown, a group representing the interests of merchants in the city centre. In their front page news, they express concerns about changes in Schengen regulations which will go into effect after the new year, with special concern focussed on eastern Europeans, who “lead the highest rates of crime on the European continent”. Jakob repeated these concerns to RÚV.
This assertion is false. Britain actually tops that list, with Ireland, Estonia, Holland and Denmark followed behind. Furthermore, the nationalities of the suspects in the heist remain unknown.
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