Masked gunman’s brazen Channel 7 theft revealed
THE chilling moment when masked thieves threatened a Channel 7 crew with a gun live on air has been captured on camera. Shaken reporter Laurel Irving was forced to abruptly end her live cross just seconds before signing off on Sunrise.
NSW
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THE chilling moment when masked thieves threatened a Channel 7 crew with a gun live on air has been captured on camera.
The network’s London reporter Laurel Irving was reporting on the Royal Family from Exmouth Market in Islington when she became the story.
Ms Irving and cameraman Jimmy Cannon were just seconds from signing off on the Sunrise program when they were approached by men wearing ski masks.
The men took off with about $26,000 worth of equipment.
This morning Mr Cannon said he saw one of the men transfer an item from his pants to his jacket.
“He goes, ‘I’ve got a gun in my jacket, don’t make a scene. It’s pointed at you, unclip the camera and give it to me’,” he said on Sunrise.
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Ms Irving confirmed on air that they had not gotten the stolen camera back.
“The thing about this is how brazen it was,” she said.
“We were in an up market area surrounded by people in restaurants and cafes — it wasn’t that late at night, cars and buses going past and these guys still pulled it off.”
In the video, a shaken Ms Irving was heard saying “Sorry I’m just being disturbed here.”
One thief demands, “Pick it up and hand it over!”
Ms Irving told Melbourne radio station 3AW yesterday that one of them threatened Mr Cannon and forced him to hand over the camera.
When Ms Irving attempted to wrestle away from the offender, Mr Cannon told her: “No, no, he’s got a gun.”
“We never saw any weapons but Jimmy was convinced that if he didn’t have a gun he would have had a knife,” she said on radio.
“The thing that didn’t trigger alarm bells for me was that they were dressed in quite up-market active wear.
“They weren’t the scuzzy kind of down and outs of the world, they looked more together than that and they were riding mountain bikes.”