French bank staff forget 91-year-old locked in vault

Only the love of a good son saved the poor old lady from a potentially lethal oversight as the bank only re-opens on Tuesday.

The unnamed pensioner turned up at her local BNP-Paribas branch in Rennes, western France on Saturday morning asking to have access to her personal safe. An employee escorted the lady and locked her in to the vault, according to normal procedure.

However, at closing time, staff totally forgot about the aged customer, who has no mobile telephone.

Unable to reach his mother on Saturday night, her son eventually alerted the police to her disappearance and the search began.

Local police chief Pascal Serrand told France Info: "After retracing all the ports of call she knew, we worked out there were a number of bank branches where she could have gone."

Eventually, they got through to a BNP contact in Paris who "accepted to send two security agents to go and check" whether she was in the building. "We didn't hold out much hope, but you never know...," he said.

When they opened the front door, the agents "heard a little voice coming from the safe vault," said the police chief. They finally managed to open the vault at 10am on Sunday morning. According to police, the pensioner was calmly sitting inside in the dark, was in good shape and "bore no grudge".

Suffering from mild dehydration, she spent the next couple of hours in a nearby hospital.

An investigation has been launched to determine why the bank's internal alarm failed to go off. "It's a rather sad affair but which ends well," said the vice prosecutor of Rennes, Jean-Pierre Ollivaux.

He said that as far as he knew there was no "criminal fault committed for forgetting to check if the bank was really empty before shutting the door".