Dateline: May 9

Dateline this week investigates why people in Beirut have stormed banks out of despair to seize back their deposits, including one woman who held up a bank to get her own cash back.

In August last year, Ahmad al-Sheikh Hussein received a phone call that would throw his world into a tailspin.

“It was around seven o’clock, and I was with my son at his training in western Sydney. One of my brothers in Lebanon telephoned me. He told me that our brother had attacked a bank.”

Ahmad was informed that his brother, Bassam, had walked into a local bank branch in west Beirut’s Hamra district carrying a rifle and container of petrol and had threatened to burn down the building if the manager didn’t give him exactly US$210,000 ($315,000). It was his total savings.

Over the last few decades, Lebanon has lurched from one crisis to the next and is now in the throes of the worst economic collapse any country has experienced in more than a century, with three-quarters of its population living in poverty.

Inflation has been triple-digit, and the Lebanese pound has lost around 90 per cent of its value against the US dollar. As people struggle to afford basic necessities, such as food and medicine, many have been locked out of their own savings. Bassam was one of them.

There have since been at least 10 other robberies where people have stormed banks out of despair to seize back their deposits. As with Bassam, these would-be Robin Hoods are not being formally charged or facing prison beyond their initial arrest, but are instead garnering widespread sympathy and judicial leniency.

9:30pm Tuesday on SBS.