Hours of work have been lost after a computer containing manuscripts and customer invoices was stolen from an Inverness charity shop.
The incident happened in the For the Right Reasons premises in the city’s Grant Street, Merkinch, in the early hours of Sunday morning.
It is understood that the thieves may have entered through a fire door which was left unsecured.
The charity shop, which aims to help people conquer their drug or alcohol addiction by giving them the support they need to re-integrate into society, also provides printing and publishing services.
Shop owner, the Rev Richard Burkitt, said he had been compiling about half a dozen books and that the work had been stored on the stolen Lenovo computer tower.
Mr Burkitt will now have to spend time re-working the physical copies of the books on another computer to get them ready for publication.
He said: “The significance is not the value of that computer but the value of the data on it. On it were books I had spent many hours working on.
“We’ve also lost invoices for the last three weeks. I have a wonderful bookkeeper but everything for the last three weeks is on that computer.
“We will just have to cobble these back together. We would love to have our data back, so please give us our data back.
“It’s just an irritating annoyance and I have lost a lot of data that would be totally useless to any thief.
“They probably came in because the fire door was left unsecured.
“It was an opportunistic thing. The place was left unsecure.”
Mr Burkitt said that he was woken by a phone call from police at about 7am on Sunday morning, alerting him to the fire door being open.
He said that a computer was stolen from the shop several years ago which had his own work on it.
In November 2015, thieves raided the charity shop and stole more than £100 from a Christmas hamper fund.
The culprits made off with a 2ft plastic bottle full of coins.
