The Lebanese fugitive after recovering her savings with weapons: I am not the culprit

Sally Hafez, 28, a fugitive from the authorities after forcing a bank at gunpoint to return her family's savings to treat her cancer-stricken sister, insists she is not the culprit.

She told "Reuters", standing on an unpaved road somewhere in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, where she has been hiding since the day of the incident, "We are in the country of mafias. If you are not a wolf, wolves will eat you."

Hafez stormed a branch of BLOM Bank in Beirut last week, forcibly seizing about $13,000 in savings in her sister's account that was frozen due to capital controls imposed by commercial banks overnight in 2019 but never legalized through the enactment of law.

After the dramatic footage of the accident, in which she publicized what later turned out to be a toy pistol, and stood at a desk watching the employees who handed her bundles of cash, Hafez suddenly turned into a popular heroine in a country where hundreds of thousands live deprived of their savings.

The number of those resorting to attempts to extract their rights by force is increasing, due to the internal financial collapse that has been going on for three years and which the authorities have left to fester, prompting the World Bank to describe the crisis as "manufactured by the country's elite".

Hafez was the first of at least seven depositors to storm banks in Lebanon last week, prompting banks to close their doors due to security concerns, and requesting security support from the government.

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