Arctic bank robbery stopped cold

A bank robbery that could almost be the plot for a comedy caper film came to a quick end in the world's northernmost settlement, Longyearbyen in Norway's Svalbard archipelago.

Svalbard, once known as Spitzbergen, is about 600 miles north of mainland Norway and 600 miles south of the North Pole. On Friday morning, a man identified as a foreign visitor used a gun to take money from the only bank in the town of about 2,000, the main settlement in Svalbard.

Since nearly everyone in the tiny town knows each other, and since the only way to escape is by air, it didn't take long to track him down. He was then flown to Tromso on the mainland for questioning.