Al­though the body found in Ca­roni on Sun­day is be­lieved to be that of miss­ing elec­tri­cian Shi­va Lochan, rel­a­tives say DNA test­ing has to be done be­fore they con­firm the iden­ti­ty.

A close male rel­a­tive of the 28-year-old Debe res­i­dent said DNA sam­ples had been tak­en from sev­er­al fam­i­ly mem­bers yes­ter­day, which would be used as part of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

This was af­ter rel­a­tives viewed the de­com­pos­ing body at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre, St James, on Mon­day and were un­able to give a pos­i­tive con­fir­ma­tion.

The body was found in a riv­er along Laun­dry Road, Kel­ly Vil­lage, Ca­roni, on De­cem­ber 17.

Act­ing on in­for­ma­tion re­ceived, around 12.50 pm, of­fi­cers from the Ca­roni Po­lice Sta­tion went to Hy­draulic Road and found the body.

Due to the ad­vanced lev­el of de­com­po­si­tion, rel­a­tives were un­sure if it was in fact Lochan.

The body was dis­cov­ered by a res­i­dent who claimed that he usu­al­ly set traps to catch capy­baras in the area and up­on check­ing them on Sun­day, de­tect­ed a foul stench em­a­nat­ing close by.

Up­on check­ing fur­ther, he stum­bled up­on the rot­ting body and alert­ed the po­lice.

Head of the Hunters Search and Res­cue Team Val­lence Ramb­harat said Sun­day’s dis­cov­ery had brought a halt to their search for Lochan.

The group had been part of the ef­fort to lo­cate Lochan since his dis­ap­pear­ance 13 days ago.

Hop­ing this would af­ford the griev­ing fam­i­ly some kind of clo­sure, Ramb­harat ap­pealed to peo­ple, “To be very care­ful where they are park­ing their cars and spend­ing their leisure time. It is in these places that dan­ger lurks.”

Lochan was last seen around 8.45 pm on De­cem­ber 7, when he left home af­ter re­port­ed­ly re­ceiv­ing a call about a job.

Ramb­harat urged cit­i­zens, “Let your fam­i­ly know where you are go­ing and what you are about.”

Snr Supt, Cen­tral Di­vi­sion, Garvin Si­mon echoed sim­i­lar con­cerns as he called on shop­pers and es­pe­cial­ly mo­torists to ex­er­cise height­ened vig­i­lance dur­ing this hol­i­day sea­son.

He ad­vised, “Make your­self a hard tar­get.”

This he ex­plained, meant not leav­ing cars idling while run­ning out to pur­chase food or play Lot­to and avoid­ing walk­ing around with large sums of cash.

Re­gard­ing this lat­est dis­cov­ery in his ju­ris­dic­tion, Si­mon said that with­in the last three to four months, of­fi­cers had no­ticed a trend where bod­ies were be­ing dumped in the Di­vi­sion.

He said in many of the dis­cov­er­ies, the vic­tims’ hands and feet had been bound, lead­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tors to be­lieve they were killed else­where and then dumped.

He said an in­crease in ve­hic­u­lar rob­beries had al­so been record­ed, many of which had proven to be crimes of op­por­tu­ni­ty with cars be­ing tak­en away at gun­point, as op­posed to ve­hic­u­lar lar­ce­ny where they were stolen af­ter be­ing locked and parked.