I didn't sketch robbery plans for my boyfriend, NatWest bank worker tells police

Rachael Shariar-Namini is alleged to have provided inside information about a branch where she used to work to help her boyfriend and another man carry out a 371,000 robbery at the premises.

The jury has been told her boyfriend William Wormald, accomplice Darren Ashcroft, and David Cowie, who provided the getaway car, have admitted their parts in the robbery at the NatWest branch in Church Street, Hunslet, Leeds, on March 9.

Shariar-Namini, 23, of Victoria Avenue, Rothwell, Leeds, denies robbery.

In police interviews read to a jury at Leeds Crown Court today 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 told police she thought the plans had been thrown in a bin and it was all a joke.

She told the officer: "I just got taken away with it, having a laugh, just pretending, messing about. I just thought they had gone in the bin."

In the police interview she claimed it was her boyfriend who had drawn the plans.

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 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 to be collected by Securicor.

It is 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 previously 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 and they became boyfriend and girlfriend.

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.

The trial was adjourned until tomorrow.