A record 50 000 leva award has been offered to anyone who can provide information about the armed robbery of a private vault in Sofia on December 10 2009, Bulgarian media reported.

The reward has been offered by the St Ivan Rilski Priorate of Bulgaria of The Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem.

"The order did not suffer losses as a result of the robbery but it decided to stand by me and support me as one of its members," Boyan Boyanov, whose company BMD Protection owns the robbed vault on Sofia’s Dondoukov Boulevard, told Bulgarian-language Trud daily.

Thieves managed to access the vault by using a client’s card in the late hours of December 10 2009. The two guards, who were pushed to the floor and handcuffed, were no match for the armed and masked attackers.

The gang had all the time they needed to open between 160 and 190 safety boxes and escape with the contents.

All police traced, a few hours later, were the gang’s two abandoned vehicles with no sign of the thieves. Aside from the vault’s belongings, the gang also managed to steal a computer server holding all CCTV recordings, leaving police with few clues.

The total value of the robbers’ haul has been put at several million leva because the vault was also used by several jewellers in the area. That was probably why it was targeted.

Police suspect that the hit had been organised months in advance with robbers probably renting a box to get the access card and acquaint themselves with the surroundings and the vault’s security system.