BBC The Gold: The Inside Story – what happened in the Brink’s-Mat gold robbery?

In 1983, armed robbers stole a large amount of gold from the Brink’s-Mat warehouse near London’s Heathrow airport. Police were in a race against time before the gold was melted, disguised and sold back on the open market, fuelling criminal enterprise on an unprecedented scale.

Billed as “the crime of the century”, the ensuing investigation lasted until 1992 and became one of the country’s longest police investigations. BBC One’s serial dramatisation of the crime aired its concluding episode on Sunday (March 19), and the broadcaster is set to air a documentary that hears from the detectives who worked on the case.

Airing on BBC One on Monday, The Gold: The Inside Story will see Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Boyce, who led the investigation, and DC Tony Yeoman speaking on film for the first time since the robbery almost 40 years ago. They will disclose the challenges they faced and the strategy they used in the hunt for the gold.

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Speaking in the documentary, DCS Boyce says: “Our task was far greater than just arresting the robbers, we hadn’t even recovered the dust of the gold. We had to work extremely hard, follow the trail and recover as much of the gold as possible.”

Using archive footage and eyewitness testimony, the documentary will detail the cat-and-mouse chase across borders and continents and the tracking of a corrupt network who helped to launder the money. But what happened in the Brink’s-Mat robbery?

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At 6.40am on November 26, 1983, six armed robbers posing as security guards confronted staff