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Clerk, Customers Tied Up During Gas Station Robbery In Portage Park

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Imagine walking into a gas station and right into the middle of a robbery. It happened in Portage Park and surveillance cameras were rolling.

CBS 2's Pamela Jones talked to the store clerk who thought he might not make it out alive.

The clerk and a female customers were tied up with plastic zip ties along with two more customers who walked in during the robbery.

"He was like, 'You know I can shoot you, right? I can shoot you. Don't move,'" said store clerk Mudassir Mohammed.

The threats were backed up with a handgun aimed at the convenience store clerk behind the counter Monday night.

Muddassir Mohammed says just after 9:45 p.m. a pair robbers, a man in a red hat and a female in a white hat, acted like customers at first when they entered the Citgo store near Milwaukee and Berteau in the Portage Park neighborhood. The man was wielding a gun and demanded cash from the register.

"For a second when I see the gun, I was like, I don't know how to react," said Mohammed.

Neither did several customers, like one woman who unknowingly walked in waiting to be waited on as one person after another ending up getting led to a back room and tied up.

Surveillance video shows Mohammed hand over some bills, then with his hands raised in surrender, he is ushered to the back, where he says the female suspect held him down.

"Was helpless because she was having her foot on my head and having my head like that. I couldn't see that was going on. I just can hear the customers coming and he's trying to pull them out," Mohammed said.

In the end, the suspects ran from the store. The customers and clerk emerged from the ordeal shaken, but not hurt.

The clerk says the robbers got away with some cash, cigarettes and cigars.

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