Crooks took life savings I'd kept for retirement; VICTIM.

A RETIRED jeweller lost most of his six-figure pension fund to the Hatton Garden heist.

Kjeld Jacobsen, 73, opened a safe-deposit box after shutting down his jewellery store after 45 years.

The father of two transferred hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of jewels to the vault, planning to use them to fund his retirement.

He was told by police the morning after the heist that his box had been raided.

Mr Jacobsen, whose shop Argenta was on Fulham Road in London, said: "I called my wife and said, 'It is empty, we have to live with that'.

"There is absolutely nothing you can do about it."

He added: "I could have insured it with ease and it wouldn't have been expensive, but you don't normally insure when you put things into a safe-deposit box. Around a third of his valuables were recovered, but most of the "really good stuff " is gone.

He said of his retirement: "We will have to think about a few things that we might not be able to do, but generally we can deal with it - we have to."

Mr Jacobsen blamed the break-in on the building's security system. He said: "The equipment they had was not up to date. They should have had cameras everywhere. In my business, the second anything happened it would turn up on my mobile."

CAPTION(S):

RANSACKED Chaos after vault was targeted by gang