Al­most two hun­dred ar­rests have been made in re­la­tion to the theft of State in­fra­struc­ture for scrap iron, act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Mc Don­ald Ja­cob told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day.

Three peo­ple were ar­rest­ed in two sep­a­rate in­ci­dents on Wednes­day for steal­ing TSTT ca­bles. One ar­rest was made in Trinci­ty, the oth­er in St Joseph, while 32-year-old busi­ness­man Sum­it Chad­ha, of Ch­agua­nas, was charged for al­leged­ly be­ing in pos­ses­sion of a mil­lion dol­lars’ worth of iron, which was stolen from a Min­istry of Works com­pound in Ca­roni.

“Our records show that we have ar­rest­ed 184 per­sons so far in re­la­tion to this whole as­pect of scrap and the cut­ting of the TSTT cop­per ca­ble,” Ja­cob said.

How­ev­er, Ja­cob said the peo­ple he’s hop­ing to go af­ter are those who buy the scrap iron.

“We must let peo­ple know that the re­ceiv­er is dealt with, twice times the fines and penal­ties as the per­son who did the steal­ing be­cause these are the peo­ple who are en­cour­ag­ing you know, the per­sons who are ac­tu­al­ly do­ing the steal­ing, they are en­cour­ag­ing them be­cause they are pro­vid­ing a mar­ket for it,” Ja­cob said.

He said the buy­ers are the peo­ple po­lice are tar­get­ing through in­tel­li­gence.

When asked if he felt the scrap iron in­dus­try need­ed to be reg­u­larised he said, “Well, that is so ob­vi­ous, it def­i­nite­ly needs to be reg­u­lat­ed, be­cause it’s cre­at­ing a se­ri­ous prob­lem in Trinidad and To­ba­go. I know there were sev­er­al meet­ings and there seem to be ef­forts be­ing made to reg­u­late all as­pects of the scrap yard in­dus­try. And we are there to sup­port it.”

Ja­cob has held sev­er­al meet­ings with Scrap Iron Deal­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Al­lan Fer­gu­son al­ready for the year.