Stick 'em up! Italy leads Europe in bank robberies

ROME, (Reuters Life!) - If you find yourself in the middle of a bank robbery in Europe, odds are you're in Italy.

Data released this week showed Italy tops Europe in the number of bank hold-ups, with an average of eight bank robberies every day in the first half of 2007.

That's more than half the average 15 daily robberies across all of Europe in past years, according to data collected by Italian trade unions.

"We feel under attack, left to fend for ourselves against the robbers," said bank employee Stefano Bellettati, who told La Repubblica newspaper he lived through nine bank robberies in 11 years in northern Italy.

Three of Bellettati's robberies happened in the past year, a spike reflected by national data showing a 26 percent rise in bank robberies in the first half of 2007.

Bellettati said that he believed that banks in Italy were more at risk than elsewhere in Europe because Italian tellers had more cash, and because security was more slack than elsewhere.

The European Banking Federation is expected to publish its 2006 data next month. Between 2003 and 2005, the last year that official European data was available, Italy reported 45 percent of all European bank robberies with 7,845 heists, the unions said.