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Several southern Saskatchewan communities are picking up the pieces after thieves broke into their Canada Post and Rural Municipality offices.
Residents of Rhein, 36 kilometres north east of Yorkton, woke up Friday morning to find their post office smashed and mail stolen.
“They’d taken the mail out of the boxes, going through the mail and destroyed computers. It was a big mess,” post master Cheryl Nagy said.
She said the thieves likely planned their break in because they brought bolt cutters and tried to file down the hinges on the post office safe.
Nagy said the perpetrators stole all the packages they could, then discarded the unwanted ones along the highway.
“They just tossed them out the window, so they left a trail behind them,” she said.
Yorkton Rural RCMP said post offices and Rural Municipality offices in several communities including Kamsack, Canora and Churchbridge were broken into that night. Despite admitting that’s an unusually high number of government building break-ins in one night, RCMP do not yet know if the incidents are related and said they would likely not divulge that information at this point in the investigation.
Nagy said the last time the post office was broken into was more than 50 years ago when thieves stole the entire post office safe. Unable to get the safe open, they dumped it in the Lake of the Prairies that runs along the Saskatchewan Manitoba border, where it was recovered.
Despite the low crime rate in the community, Nagy said the experience has left her shaken.
“It’s still traumatizing because you feel like you’ve been violated and when you walk in there you don’t feel safe anymore,” she said.
Nagy said they’ve started the clean up process in order to be back in business Monday morning. They will also do inventory and contact patrons to find out what mail is missing.
