Criminals who travel to Mid Wales are getting a tough time, according to police, after three arrests were made in Knighton this week.
The trio were charged and appeared before Welshpool magistrates on Wednesday. Two were remanded in custody and one was given stringent bail conditions.
Police had been called to Broad Street in Knighton in the early hours of Tuesday, after receiving a call about suspicious activity. The premises had been attacked last week, and two officers were on patrol in the area as a result.
They arrived at the scene and detained three men from Telford, who were carrying crowbars and trying to remove the office safe. This success follows six arrests last month, involving a team from Merseyside and one from the East Midlands.
Police achieved further success in October due, they said, to detailed inquiries and patrolling vulnerable areas.
They found an abandoned stolen vehicle, believed to have been used by the Merseyside team in a series of connected burglaries in Newtown, Llanidloes, Llandrindod Wells and Rhayader. It was identified in Newtown and seized.
Shortly afterwards, officers received a report of a stolen Astra, which they located and pursued from Newtown to Builth Wells and back to Llandrindod Wells before a ‘Stinger’ was deployed to deflate its tyres.
Two of the three occupants made off but were arrested. The third team member then stole a Mazda car in Llandrindod, which was identified the following day by automatic number plate recognition in Nuneaton and the suspect was detained.
The East Midlands suspects were arrested after a burglary from a waste disposal depot near Llandrindod in mid-October.
The previous week, officers had been called to the same location after a report of suspicious activity, but the suspects had left the premises in a stolen articulated lorry which they abandoned, blocking the road, before escaping in an Audi 4×4 car.
• Continued on page of Mid Wales Journal, November 6, 2008.
