By Latrishka Thomas
On Thursday morning, employees at the National Archives of Antigua and Barbuda were greeted by the evidence of a break-in, thereby making it one of many places that that has suffered from a recent spate of theft.
The perpetrator raided the Archives’ storeroom through a window in the kitchen area and stole some ground tools, the grounds custodian of the Archives, Olton Mitchell said.
Mitchell added that it was upon searching the storage room for his tools that he noticed a number of items had vanished. These include a weed whacker, a gas bottle, an edge clipper, a shovel and a pickaxe.
And, according to him, the incident was reported to the police, but since then it was discovered that more items were missing as well.
Meantime, the Chief of Staff in the Office of the Prime Minister Lionel “Max” Hurst, who reports to Cabinet on behalf of the Archives, told OBSERVER media that the Curator of the Archives, Joseph Prosper — who is presently off island — believes that the individual/s who committed the crime had to have been familiar with the Archives.
“He says they didn’t seem to have gone anywhere beyond where these items were and he therefore suspects that it is someone who has come to the National Archives to do work and I’m not speaking about research work either.
“Somebody knew where the weed-whacker was, broke the window in order to enter and to steal these things and then exit with the weed-whacker,” Hurst said.