Weeping woman told she faces jail over her role in bank raid

A BANK employee who provided inside information to her boyfriend for a raid at a NatWest branch was last night facing a “substantial” prison sentence

Rachel Shariar-Namini wept as a jury at Leeds Crown Court found her guilty of robbery at the branch in Leeds where she used to work.

She was accused of drawing up plans of the branch and passing them on to her boyfriend who then carried out a 371,000 robbery at the premises along with another man.

Her boyfriend William Wormald, accomplice Darren Ashcroft and David Cowie, who provided the getaway car, had previously admitted their roles in the robbery at the NatWest branch in Church Street, Hunslet, Leeds, on March 9.

All four will now be sentenced the week beginning September 20 after the jury found Shariar-Namini guilty by a majority of 11- 1.

Judge Sally Cahill, QC, adjourned the case for the preparation of a pre-sentence report and remanded Shariar-Namini in custody.

She told her: “You are aware you are facing a substantial custodial term.”

Shariar-Namini, 23, of Victoria Avenue, Rothwell, Leeds, denied robbery and claimed her boyfriend drew up the plans and she wrote on them. Earlier she told the jury she had no idea her boyfriend would use the details to commit a crime.

She told police she thought the plans had been thrown in a bin and it was all a joke.

Shariar-Namini told police: “I just got taken away with it, having a laugh, just pretending, messing about. I just thought they had gone in the bin.”

In police interviews read to the jury she denied sketching the plans.

She recalled a drunken night where she wrote on the plans, but denied sketching them out.

Asked by the interviewing police office if she had drawn the layout of the bank, she replied: “I haven’t drawn it, no.”

She said: “I was just drunk and wrote on it. I haven’t drawn it, I have written the words.”

She told the officers she was an “idiot” but said she had never knowingly discussed procedures at the bank.

“My life is my work, that’s all I talk about,” she told officers.

The court has previously heard Wormald and another man broke in through the roof of the bank into the women’s toilets on a first floor and then stole 371,691 which staff had got ready for a Securicor collection.

The jury was told Wormald and Ashcroft, who were masked, entered the bank and gestured staff away from their desks while one went to a temporary storage area where the money was waiting for Securicor.

Earlier the court heard Shariar-Namini joined NatWest at 20 and had received certificates for her good work including a 50 reward for thwarting a 60,000 fraud.

In a letter found in her handbag Wormald had written to her: “Hope we get the money and then we can have a house for Christmas.”

It was the Crown’s case that Shariar-Namini was guilty because she provided the inside information.

It is alleged she had a “detailed knowledge” of the layout and procedures, having worked at the Hunslet branch until about a month earlier when she had been promoted and moved to the Rothwell branch as manager.

Some months before the robbery she had been introduced to Wormald.

He was not well off, working in a builder’s merchants, and she paid for things, and because she drove and he did not, was the person who drove them around, the jury was told.

It is alleged that after the raid, on Sunday March 14, Wormald and Shariar-Namini went shopping in York where two shop assistants remembered him having a lot of money.

joanne.ginley@ypn.co.uk