The world's 10 biggest robberies

Five people have been convicted in connection with the £53m robbery at a Securitas depot in Kent in February 2006. How does the raid compare with the world's biggest robberies?

1963: GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

The Great Train robbers targeted a Glasgow-to-London mail train in 1963

On 8 August 1963 armed robbers stole £2.6m in cash from the Glasgow-to-London Royal Mail train.

A gang of 15 robbers brought the train to a halt in rural Buckinghamshire with a fake stop signal.

Train driver Jack Mills, who was struck on the head during the robbery, never fully recovered from his injuries and died in 1970.

Detectives found the robbers' base, Leatherslade Farm, and a series of clues recovered there led them to most of the gang members, who were caught and sentenced to up to 30 years in jail.

One of them, Ronnie Biggs, later escaped from Wandsworth prison and fled to Brazil.

He returned to Britain in 2001 to serve the remainder of his sentence.

Most of the money - worth about £40m in today's terms - was recovered in the months following the robbery.

1976: BRITISH BANK OF THE MIDDLE EAST

On 20 January 1976 members of a Palestinian group allied to Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation stole £22m from the British Bank of the Middle East in the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Yasser Arafat's PLO made millions from the robbery

The raid, which occurred at the height of the Lebanese civil war, happened when the gang blasted through a wall the bank shared with a Catholic church.

The Palestinians reputedly employed a group of Corsican locksmiths to gain entry to the vault and the safety deposit boxes within.

The haul, which included gold bars, Lebanese money, foreign currencies, stock certificates and jewellery, had to be taken away in lorries.

The £22m - worth about £100m at today's prices - helped finance the PLO's activities throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

1983: SECURITY EXPRESS

On Easter Monday 1983 a gang broke into the Security Express depot in Shoreditch, east London, and escaped with £6m.

Ronnie Knight laundered the proceeds of the 1983 Security Express robbery

The robbery was masterminded by John Knight, the brother of Ronnie Knight, the former husband of actress Barbara Windsor.

John Knight was later jailed for 22 years.

Ronnie Knight, who was living in Spain, later admitted handling some of the stolen money and was jailed in 1994.

The haul would be worth about £26m in 2008 terms.

1983: BRINKS MAT

Six armed men gained entry to the Brinks Mat high security warehouse at Heathrow Airport on 26 November 1983 by posing as security guards.

They doused a guard with petrol and threatened to set him alight unless he opened the vault.

The Brinks Mat robbers got away with 6,000 gold bars

The gang escaped with gold bullion and diamonds worth £26m - about £112m in today's terms.

Most of the gold is thought to have been melted down and sold off, and the proceeds invested in property abroad.

But solicitor Bob McCunn, working for Brinks Mat's insurers, has so far helped to recover £27m.

Robbers Micky McAvoy and Brian Robinson were jailed for 25 years, while the inside man, Anthony Black, received a much shorter sentence after giving evidence against them.

Kenneth Noye, who was jailed for 14 years for handling some of the stolen gold, is now serving life for a murder committed in 1996.

1987: KNIGHTSBRIDGE SAFETY DEPOSIT CENTRE

At least £40m of goods were stolen from 120 safe deposit boxes at a warehouse opposite Harrods on a Sunday in July 1987.

The robbery was an inside job planned with the help of the managing director of the centre, Parvez Latif, who was heavily in debt.

Italian Valerio Viccei received a 22-year sentence for masterminding the theft.

In 1992 he was given the right to serve the rest of his sentence in an Italian jail, but in 2000, while on day release, he was gunned down by police after acting suspiciously.

The whereabouts of most of the £40m horde remains unknown.

1990: CITY BONDS

On 2 May 1990 a financial messenger was robbed at knifepoint in a quiet City of London side street.

He had been carrying Treasury bonds worth £292m.

Detectives believe the mugging was carried out by Patrick Thomas, a small-time crook from south London who was shot dead before he could be charged.

The police later recovered all but two of the bonds after a tip-off.

One man, Keith Cheeseman, received a six-and-a-half-year sentence for laundering the stolen bonds.

1995: MIDLAND BANK CLEARING CENTRE

On 3 July 1995 a gang ambushed a Securicor van at the Midland Bank Clearing Centre in Salford, Greater Manchester.

Graham Huckerby (left) was wrongly convicted for the Salford robbery

Using violence and threats they forced the van's driver, Graham Huckerby, to let them in and then took over the van and drove it away. They escaped with £6.6m in cash.

Mr Huckerby was later accused of being the "inside man" and was convicted in 2002, along with another man, and jailed for 14 years.

Both men's convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal in December 2004 and they walked free.

The robbery remains unsolved and none of the money was ever recovered.

2004: NORTHERN BANK

On 20 December 2004 a gang stole £26.4m from the headquarters of the Northern Bank in Belfast - the largest amount of cash ever taken in a robbery in the UK.

It is believed the IRA may have been involved in the Northern Bank robbery

The scale of the robbery was so large the bank had to withdraw its notes and replace them with new ones with different logos and colours.

It also had political ramifications as it was blamed on the IRA, who were supposed to have ended all criminal activity.

Most of the stolen cash has yet to be recovered.

One man, Christopher Ward, a bank employee, is due to go on trial later this year.

2005: BANCO CENTRAL

In 2005 robbers stole £38m from a branch of the Banco Central in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza.

The robbers spent three months digging this tunnel

The robbers spent months preparing for the raid. Basing themselves in a house opposite the bank, they toiled on a 200m (656ft) tunnel into the bank and broke through the final metre of steel-reinforced concrete.

Choosing the weekend of 6/7 August 2005 - when they knew the bank would be closed - they set about emptying the vault of millions of reals, the local currency.

The bank was not insured but about £4m has been recovered.

Several people have been arrested in the past few months.

One of the masterminds, Luis Fernando Ribeiro, 26, was found shot dead on an isolated road 200 miles (320km) west of Rio de Janeiro two months after the robbery. It is thought he may have fallen out with other members of the gang or been double-crossed.

2007: DAR ES SALAAM BANK

Possibly the world's biggest robbery occurred in July 2007 but the raid got surprisingly little coverage in the media.

Police said three guards who worked at the private Dar Es Salaam bank in Baghdad's Karrada district had apparently walked off with $292m (£146m) from the bank's vaults.

Iraq has been heavily reliant on a cash economy since the British and US invasion in 2003, and this made banks highly vulnerable.

The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior is still investigating the robbery, but there has been no news of the money or the culprits.

In March 2003 the then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein ordered his sons Uday and Qusay to steal $1bn (£500m) from the Central Bank of Iraq in Baghdad. About two-thirds of the money was later found hidden in the walls of one of the leader's palaces. But because of Saddam's position this is not really considered a robbery in the traditional sense.