The daring robbery shocked the poker world back in March, when four armed men entered the Hyatt Grand Hotel in Berlin brandishing machetes/axes and what turned out to be a starter pistol, and were able to escape with some €242,000 of the €1,000,000 prize-money at the European Poker Tour tournament.

Two other men have also been arrested and face separate trials for their roles as planners and conspirators. All six men were from Berlins Arabic/Turkish community, and one of the conspirators was said to be playing in the tournament and tipped off the others as far as when to strike.

Three of the four men are considered juveniles by the German court system –aged 19-20–and were sentenced to 3 and ½ years in a juvenile correction facility. The fourth member of the robbery team was sentenced to 3 years and 9 months in prison thanks to his age of 21 years.

The sentence seems fairly light in lieu of the crime, the manner it was carried out, and the still unknown whereabouts of the bulk of the stolen money; only a few thousand Euros were ever recovered. It’s also strange that they all received basically the same sentence when some of them had voluntarily turned themselves in while others fled the country.

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Tags: Hyatt Grand Hotel, poker robbery suspects, poker robbery suspects sentenced

This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 9:15 am and is filed under EPT News, World Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.