‘If you are not a wolf, the wolves will eat you’: Lebanese woman who held up bank at gunpoint says she is not the criminal | THE DAILY TRIBUNE | KINGDOM OF BAHRAIN

  • Date: 22-Sep-2022
  • Source: The Daily Tribune - News of Bahrain
  • Sector:Financial Services
  • Country:Lebanon
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‘If you are not a wolf, the wolves will eat you’: Lebanese woman who held up bank at gunpoint says she is not the criminal | THE DAILY TRIBUNE | KINGDOM OF BAHRAIN

On the run from authorities after forcing a bank to release her family savings at gunpoint to treat her cancer-stricken sister, 28-year-old Lebanese interior designer Sali Hafiz insists she is not the criminal. "We are in the country of mafias. If you are not a wolf, the wolves will eat you," she told Reuters, standing on a dirt track somewhere in Lebanon's rugged eastern Bekaa valley where she has since been in hiding. Hafiz held up a Beirut branch of BLOM Bank last week, taking by force some $13,000 in savings in her sister's account, frozen by capital controls that were imposed overnight by commercial banks in 2019, but never made legal via legislation. Dramatic footage of the incident, in which she cocks what later turned out to be a toy gun and stands atop a desk bossing around employees who hand her wads of cash, turned her into an instant folk hero in a country where hundreds of thousands of people are locked out of their savings. A growing number are taking matters into their own hands, exasperated by a three-year financial implosion that authorities have left to fester – leading the World Bank to describe it as "orchestrated