How Uldis unsuccessfully robbed the Riga Commercial Bank in 1992 using a knife and gas

The protagonist of this story, Uldis (“Delphi“It has been decided not to publish the last name of the criminal) was born in Aluksne in 1957. During the Soviet occupation, he was tried several times for various crimes. In 1978, Urdi was sentenced to one year in prison for fraud, and in 1984 he was sentenced to another year in prison “for evading treatment for venereal diseases and for possibly infecting other people with venereal diseases.”

According to the criminal case materials kept in the Latvian State Archives, in the early 1990s, Uldis was deeply in debt, amounting to $5,000, and he decided to solve the problem by robbing a bank. Uldis’ choice of which bank to go to was very simple – in the early 1990s, Rīgas Komercbanka was the second largest private bank in Latvia, with several branches and a turnover of about 10 billion rubles in 1991.

Before the crime, Uldis bought weapons that were not particularly serious for such a dangerous job as bank robbery. In the summer of 1991, he bought a hunting knife from an unidentified man in the Cesis Castle Park and carried it with him. On the other hand, a month before the crime, in June 1992, Uldis bought a tear gas canister from an unidentified person at the Riga railway station.

On July 2, 1992, in Riga, Uldis, armed with a knife and a gas cylinder, went to