World Business

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. The million-dollar robberies occurred in the parking lots of jewels stores, hotels and restaurants and took but a few terrifying seconds.

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Masked gunmen and knife-wielding attackers ambushed cars and smashed windows to scare jewelry salesmen and couriers into submission under the jurisdiction whisking absent their commodities. The thieves, focused enough to leap their victims, remain at large posterior heists across the South.

In Arkansas, the FBI is launching an investigation into the robberies, including the latest: a daytime heist Tuesday in Little Rock in which thieves made off with $500,000 in jewelry. Agents say that robbery, matching two others last month in Pine Bluff and Nashville, Tenn., shares similarities through a string of jewelry thefts in Houston worth at least $3.5 million.

“In cases like these, it’s standard investigative procedure for the FBI to check other FBI field offices for similar types of crimes,” said Steve Frazier, a spokesman for the FBI’s Little Rock field work.

In Houston, police be seized of responded to at minutest six robberies of jewelry salesmen and couriers since April, one netting pressingly $1.5 million in diamonds. Officers say the thieves used pepper shoot, pistol-whipping and knives to subsist near at hand their victims.

“They definitely appear to be preplanned,” said Shauna Dunlap, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Houston field office. “They show to be assured of where these individuals are going to be at a particular time.”

FBI and police suspect the thefts could be part of what the bureau refers to as “South American Theft Groups.” Agents say the groups, illegal immigrants from countries such as Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, stake out traveling salesmen and jewels shows and at intervals trek across the country for heists.

Investigators freshly arrested three Colombian nationals loitering around Houston-area trinkets stores. Dunlap said the men, held as far as concerns illegally re-entering the United States, were being questioned about the robberies.

In June, robbers attacked couriers at a hotel in Nashville and a rob mall in Pine Bluff. Both victims told police the attacks happened quickly, with one jeweler even losing the diamonds hidden inside his socks. Each man reported loss about $500,000 in stones for the time of the heists.

Tuesday’s lunchtime robbery, along a well-traveled street in Arkansas’ capital, targeted a salesman who flew into Little Rock National Airport on a private plane.

Despite keeping their travel plans quiet, jewelry salesmen make tempting targets, often traveling alone and carrying dear stones. The Jewelers’ Security Alliance said traveling salesmen in the U.S. lost $39.5 million in stones last year in robberies and thefts.