An armed gang looted an unguarded Bank of Baroda branch in Barrackpore on Friday afternoon, emptying out the vault of around Rs 16 lakh and snatching another Rs 4 lakh in cash and valuables from customers.

The daylight heist by the gang of six, dressed in denims and T-shirts, was so meticulously planned that the entire operation was over in 10 minutes, witnesses told police.

Looting over, the robbers walked out carrying the booty in two rucksacks, got into a car and sped away.

“We have found some clues and are working on those,” Rahul Srivastava, the superintendent of police of North 24-Parganas, told Metro.

The incident occurred at the Anandapur branch of Bank of Baroda, near the number 14 rail gate in Barrackpore, around 1.30pm when close to 50 customers and officials were spread across the second floor.

“I was attending to a customer when I heard a voice asking everyone in Hindi to raise their hands. I turned around to see a young man in jeans with his face covered with a black cloth stepping out of the manager’s chamber with a gun pointed at him and three customers,” a bank official recounted.

Praveen Singh, one of the customers who was in manager Susanta Kumar Saha’s chamber, said he was made to sit and asked to hand over his cellphone. “There were so many people around but nobody dared utter a sound for fear of being shot,” he recalled.

The other five gang members, also armed, then started herding the rest of the customers and bank officials into a corner.

“Like their masked accomplice, the first thing they did was snatch our cellphones. A colleague of mine who tried to hide his cellphone under a table was assaulted,” said an official.

Once they were sure that nobody had managed to slip out of the room or raise an alarm, the gang split into groups to execute the plan. Two of the robbers headed for the vault with the keys they had snatched from the manager, one of them looted the customers and the remaining three stood guard.

By the time manager Saha pressed the siren that alerted staff on the third floor of the bank branch and people on the ground floor of the building, the gang was gone with the cash. Those who ran up the stairs to the second floor found the shutters down at the exit.

“I was chatting at a nearby tea stall when I spotted some youths stepping out of the building and getting into a white Tata Sumo. I couldn’t have imagined that they had just looted a bank, otherwise I would have jotted down the vehicle number,” said Aurobindo Saha, a resident of the area.

An officer at Barrackpore police station said the gang might have sped away towards Patulia in Khardah and hit the Kalyani Expressway. “Another possible destination is Barrackpore Ghat, from where one can take a motorboat to Hooghly. We are tracking all routes,” he added.

The daylight heist has raised questions about the lack of guards or CCTV surveillance at the bank branch.