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Daniel Calparsoro’s Netflix series, Bank Under Siege, takes us back to 1981, when a gang of robbers orchestrated a heist at the Central Bank of Barcelona. The series is inspired by true events, though many fictional plot points have been added, and certain creative liberties have also been taken. The country was going through a political upheaval at that point in time, and there was a state of chaos and uncertainty. A coup was attempted just 3 months before the heist, and so, at first, it was believed that both events were linked. Let’s find out who the mastermind of the heist was, and if the real perpetrators were ever caught and charged.

Spoiler Alert

Was the heist committed by the civil guards?

At the beginning of Bank Under Siege, we saw that, after the attempted coup conducted under the leadership of Lt. Colonel Antonio Tejero, everybody believed that the...

Netflix releases a lot of miniseries every year, and a lot of them fail to justify why they needed to tell their stories in an episodic fashion instead of taking the feature film route. If we take a look at the streaming platform’s 2024 slate so far, Fool Me Once was absolutely atrocious. The Indrani Mukerjea Story seemed like an overlong PR stunt. Baby Reindeer was phenomenal, sure. Eric was so goddamn listless. Ic 814: The Kandahar Hijack seemed like a live-action version of the incident’s Wikipedia page. The Perfect Couple seemed so disinterested in its own story. And then there was The Last Night at Tremore Beach, which spent over 8 hours spinning some elaborate tale and then eventually revealed that maybe all of it had been a figment of its protagonist’s mind. Now, we have Bank Under Siege in our hands. Does it justify its miniseries tag?...

Bank Under Siege (or Asalto Al Banco Central in Spanish), directed by Daniel Calparsoro, is based on true events that shook all of Spain on 22nd May 1981. A group of 11 armed men with masks on their faces entered the Central Bank of Barcelona to rob the bank. While initially it appeared that these were some professional bank robbers, later it was speculated that the criminals might have a political motive. [Spoiler Alert] Most of the things shown in Netflix’s Bank Under Siege are true. Such tragic events did take place in real life, but the creators of the show have taken a few creative liberties, like adding certain fictional characters, and incorporated a few conspiracy theories based on real-life interviews, mainly to dramatize the narrative and take the entertainment quotient a notch above.

In real-life too, the assailants had demanded the release of political prisoners of the country, which made the...