A man has been seized from a Perth city centre nail bar by police and immigration officers during a three-hour raid.
Five officers from the force and the Home Office rushed into Nail Icon on South Street at 11am.
Minutes later, a second group of police officers and a member of Perth and Kinross Council entered the premises.
After three-hours of intense presence on South Street, two immigration enforcement officers placed one man from the site into the back of a van at 2pm.
The shop was closed and it is unsure when it will re-open.
Staff at Nail Icon refused to comment on the matter, only stating the officers were “there to check”.
It is now the third time the shop has been hit in the last two years.
On November 17 2016, two people were arrested as part of a border police swoop.
In September of the same year, three men were detained, in a similar raid.
All five people were of Vietnamese origin.
The previous searches came as part of a crackdown on suspected human trafficking.
After the raids, the windows of the shop were covered with decorations so that passersby couldn’t see in.
On each occasion, the shop re-opened the next day.
One witness from a nearby store said: “I was serving a customer when all of a sudden vans pulled up onto the pavement and immigration officers and police piled into the shop.
“They were there for some time.
“I would say there was at least a dozen officers there between the Home Office and uniformed and plain clothed police.
“It is a pretty busy shop. Whenever I pass there are always people in and a girl I work with has heard it has a good reputation.
“It’s been raided before and on one occasion there was even more officers than this.”
In recent years, nail bars have become targets for immigration enforcement teams because of their historical links with human traffickers in countries such as Vietnam.
Around 100 raids have been carried out by police and immigration officers in Scotland alone in the past five years.
The Home Office refused to comment.
