Man arrested for committing 12 robberies in two weeks in Los Cristianos

The National Police have arrested a 38-year-old Italian man charged with committing a dozen robberies in Los Cristianos in the last two weeks, targeting local businesses when they were shut, causing significant concern among local business owners.

Over the last fifteen days, the National Police had received numerous very similar denuncias from the owners of businesses in Los Cristianos, who all reported that they had been broken into at night by someone either forcing the front door or breaking a window, taking the money from the cash register, and leaving, and all are within a radius of no more than two kilometres of each other.

Given this information, the Police explained that an investigation was underway, with a surveillance team in place for special emphasis on the prevention of more burglaries and the search for the thief and, at the same time, each individual case was looked at as well.

After getting CCTV footage from the premises that had security cameras, they could plainly see the same 'modus operandi' in all of the burglaries, and a man with the same characteristics.

This culminated in them catching the Italian thief while he was fleeing one of the robberies, and on first sight, his physical characteristics matched those of the man in the footage.

After taking him to the National Police station in Playa Las Americas, they confirmed his identity, and via fingerprinting, found that his matched those found at the scene of several of the crimes.

The investigation is ongoing as police believe there are others that he will be linked with. He has currently been released pending trial.