A 25-year-old Laven­tille man is in po­lice cus­tody, af­ter he was caught by a busi­ness own­er and the po­lice min­utes af­ter he broke in­to a store in down­town Port-of-Spain on Sat­ur­day night.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice re­ports, the busi­ness­man locked his store and left for the day at around mid­day on Sat­ur­day af­ter­noon.

How­ev­er, hours lat­er, at around 9 pm, he re­ceived a call from a per­son in the area who re­port­ed that the busi­ness place had been bro­ken in­to and a stranger was in­side the prop­er­ty.

The man called po­lice, who ar­rived at the store with of­fi­cers from the Port-of-Spain Task Force.

On en­ter­ing the com­pound, they found the sus­pect, who was ar­rest­ed and sub­se­quent­ly tak­en to the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal for treat­ment for mi­nor in­juries.

Of­fi­cers from the Port-of-Spain CID are con­tin­u­ing en­quiries.

Just last week, the Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion (DO­MA) is­sued a se­cu­ri­ty alert among busi­ness­peo­ple to raise aware­ness about a spate of night­time rob­beries in the cap­i­tal.

The as­so­ci­a­tion said ad­di­tion­al bur­glar­ies have con­tin­ued to oc­cur on a reg­u­lar ba­sis, in­clud­ing re­peat­ed at­tacks on the same premis­es, de­spite an alert cir­cu­lat­ed to the down­town busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty on De­cem­ber 30. The as­so­ci­a­tion said the pat­tern of bur­glar­ies sug­gests per­pe­tra­tors are tar­get­ing spe­cif­ic items.

DO­MA said be­fore Christ­mas, cell­phone, tech­nol­o­gy and toy stores were af­fect­ed. Since Christ­mas, how­ev­er, shops sell­ing blan­kets, sheet sets, or­na­ments and high-fash­ion gar­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly ladies’ tops and jeans, have been tar­get­ed. Busi­ness­es sell­ing these items were urged to take ad­di­tion­al pre­cau­tions.

The as­so­ci­a­tion said it had been in con­tact with po­lice au­thor­i­ties at City Hall and the May­or’s Of­fice, and con­firmed that the mat­ters are un­der ac­tive in­ves­ti­ga­tion by the Crim­i­nal In­ves­ti­ga­tion De­part­ment based at the St Clair Po­lice Sta­tion.