Hours after Abdallah Al-Saii spilled gasoline over the floors of his hometown bank, and threatened to use his lighter to burn it down unless he got his cash, he was hailed as “al batal,” Arabic for hero.
“They stole my money and I wanted it back,” he told The Post Wednesday in an interview from his home in Kefraya, a village in the West Beqaa District of Lebanon, about 50 miles southeast of Beirut. “I had $400,000 deposited at the bank, but since 2019, they would only allow me to take out $200 a month.”
Al-Saii said the cash had come from the 2018 sale of a family property in West Beqaa, a valley studded with vineyards and farms.
Deposits have been frozen in Lebanon since the collapse of the country’s economy in 2019 — a situation caused by years of corruption, waste and mismanagement, economists say. The spiraling financial crisis has plunged 80 percent of the country into poverty and seen the local currency lose 95 percent of its value — a situation the World Bank recently called the worst financial crisis since the 19th century.
Disgruntled depositors holding up banks in order to retrieve their own money have now become regular occurrences throughout the country, according to reports — with Al-Saii among the first, but hardly the last. Earlier this month, an armed woman held up a bank in Beirut, walking away with $13,000 of her own money.
Lebanese “bank robber” Al-Saii with his wife, Karen Jimenez, son David and daughter Lunamar. The entrepreneur said he lost money on a car wash business in Colombia, where his wife is from, because he couldn’t access his account.Provided by Abdallah Al-Saii
Al-Saii, 38, retrieved $50,000 of his own money after a tense, three-hour standoff with police and managers at a branch of Lebanon’s BACC bank in Kefraya in January. Immediately afterward, his photo was splashed across newspapers and TV screens in Lebanon, and social media posts hailed him as a hero.
The father of two, who lives between Lebanon and his wife’s native Colombia, said he lost money on a car wash he tried to set up in the South American country because he could not access his deposits when Lebanon’s economy collapsed.
“I had a few bills left to pay to suppliers, but I couldn’t get my money out, and the whole thing fell through,” he said.
The only way to secure his cash was through bank checks that charged more than 20 percent in fees to cash, he said. After losing much of his initial $400,000 deposit to those fees, Al-Saii, who runs a mini-market selling groceries and wine, said he was determined to get what belonged to him in full.Earlier this year, he went to the bank and spoke to the manager, who said it was impossible to extract the total remaining amount — around $50,000. The next day, January 17, Al-Saii said, he decided to take action. He made coffee and went to the cemetery to say a prayer over his mother’s grave before heading to a nearby gas station with his father.