The burglars didn't waste any time.

In a matter of minutes, state police said, thieves broke into a Bowmansville convenience store early this morning, "ripped" an automatic teller machine from the floor and left — taking the entire money-dispensing machine along with them.

"They were in and out," a manager of the Sunoco store, 1155 Reading Road, said, asking that her name not be used.

"How they got it out of here, I have no idea," she added, saying that the free-standing machine, which was about 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide, was bolted to the floor.

Shortly before 3 a.m. today, said state police Trooper Joseph Hartranft, of the Ephrata barracks, the thieves broke the glass front door of the Brecknock Township store to gain entry.

Once inside, police said, two men ripped the ATM from the floor, carried it outside, loaded it into a dark-colored minivan bearing a Maryland license plate, and left the scene.

The suspects were described by police as wearing white hooded sweatshirts and blue jeans.

"Obviously, something like this was planned ahead of time," state police Cpl. Robert Courtright, of the state police criminal division, said this morning.

"This was not random," he added. "They put some thought into it.

"They thought about how they were going to do it and when they were going to do it. They had to have scoped it out ahead of time; they knew it was there."

Courtright said an early-morning delivery person discovered that the burglary had occurred and called police. There is a store surveillance tape, Courtright said, but he said he had not seen it yet.

Anyone with information — anyone who may have noticed something suspicious such as someone seemingly casing out the store in recent days — is asked to contact state police in Ephrata at 721-2439.

Nothing else was taken and, the manager said, "to my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened here before."

But, according to newspaper records, this type of crime has happened in Lancaster County before.

In March 2004, thieves broke into another Sunoco service station, on Route 322 in Salisbury Township, and stole a bank ATM machine, according to Ephrata state police at the time.

Just as they did in today's case, police said at the time, the thieves smashed a glass door to get into the Narvon Sunoco, 7121 Division Highway, Narvon, grabbed the machine and fled.

In December 1998, police said thieves tried to break into automatic bank machines at two separate Weis markets.

About one year before, two members of a sophisticated gang of Eastern European thieves known as the YACS were convicted of stealing $44,800 from an automatic teller machine at a Bridgeport supermarket.

According to FBI spokesmen at the time, the men were members of the Yugoslavian Albanian Croatian Serbs, a group of thieves who live in New York and specialize in ATM robberies.

CONTACT US: jkelley@LNPnews.com or 481-6026