A Mara­bel­la busi­ness is count­ing loss­es of al­most US$50,000 af­ter thieves broke in­to its ware­house and stole thou­sands of brass com­po­nents over the long week­end.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, Con­trol Tech­nolo­gies Ltd, along Union Road, Mara­bel­la, was se­cured and locked last Thurs­day af­ter­noon af­ter staff left the com­pound for the week­end.

When the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor re­turned on Mon­day morn­ing, he dis­cov­ered the west­ern met­al door had been forced open and the lock bro­ken.

In­side, a large quan­ti­ty of stock was miss­ing.

A to­tal of 2,250 brass valves val­ued at US$39,617 and 2,250 brass fit­tings val­ued at US$9,652 were stolen, bring­ing the over­all loss to US$49,270.

Po­lice re­spond­ed to the scene and con­duct­ed en­quiries, in­clud­ing in­ter­views and a re­view of CCTV footage.

In­ves­ti­ga­tors said the footage has pro­duced use­ful in­for­ma­tion and arrange­ments have been made for ex­trac­tion as in­quiries con­tin­ue.

The in­ci­dent comes amid a se­ries of sim­i­lar in­dus­tri­al thefts across Mara­bel­la and the south­ern in­dus­tri­al belt in re­cent months.

In April, a TOSL En­gi­neer­ing com­pound in Mara­bel­la was bro­ken in­to, and ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$15,600 worth of in­dus­tri­al ca­ble was re­port­ed stolen, while an­oth­er ma­jor ware­house break-in took place around the same time in­volv­ing the theft of close to US$1 mil­lion in elec­tri­cal ca­bles. Po­lice have al­so re­port­ed ad­di­tion­al ca­ble-re­lat­ed in­ci­dents in near­by San Fer­nan­do dis­tricts.

PC Bir­bal and PC Lange are con­tin­u­ing en­quiries. - Kevon Felmine