A total of five robberies took place in two days in different parts of the country.

Since 2019, Lebanon has been plunged into a deep economic crisis blamed by a large part of the population on the mismanagement, corruption, negligence and inertia of a ruling class in place for decades.

The crisis was characterized by draconian banking restrictions preventing savers from having free access to their money, while the local currency lost more than 90% of its value against the dollar on the black market.

On Wednesday, the robbery led by a young Lebanese woman storming a bank in Beirut to recover her frozen savings in order to pay the hospitalization costs of her sister suffering from cancer, had a snowball effect.

That same day, a man robbed another bank in the town of Aley, northeast of the capital.

On Friday, three other robberies were recorded, including two in Beirut and one in the south of the country.

Early in the morning, a 50-year-old man, accompanied by his son in his twenties, broke into a branch of Byblos Bank in Ghaziyeh, southeast of Saida, the main city in southern Lebanon, told AFP a police source on condition of anonymity and a security guard who witnessed the incident.

"He emptied a can of gasoline on the ground, sowing panic in the bank," said the security guard, who did not want to reveal his name.

"Injustice and Oppression"

Following this incident, two other banks were stormed a few hours later in Beirut.

In the district of Tarik Jdide, the security situation was tense after a man locked himself inside a branch of the Blom Bank with police, witnesses gathered in the street told AFP.

According to them, he is an indebted trader who is demanding the withdrawal of his frozen savings and is not armed.

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Three kilometers further, in the district of Ramlet al-Bayda, a man armed with a shotgun stormed a branch of the Lebanon & Gulf Bank, residents told an AFP photographer on the spot .

Last month, a saver was cheered by crowds after he burst into a bank in Beirut, claiming, gun in hand, his more than 200,000 euros in savings, to pay for his father's hospital bills.

The bank ended up giving him nearly 30,000 euros and he surrendered to the authorities.

He was not prosecuted.

Faced with the multiplication of these incidents, the Minister of the Interior called an emergency meeting on Friday "to take the necessary security measures".

The Association of Banks of Lebanon (ABL) has also called an emergency meeting while decreeing a general closure of all branches for three days next week.

For its part, the main association of Lebanese savers expressed its support for the perpetrators of these robberies, saying that they face "injustice and oppression".

According to the World Bank, the Lebanese authorities have squandered savers' deposits for the past 30 years thanks to a Ponzi scheme.

This method - a scam consisting of remunerating existing investors with funds brought in by new entrants - has benefited the main political and economic players to the detriment of households, says the World Bank, which denounces a "deliberate depression".

© 2022 AFP