AN 88-YEAR-OLD woman was locked inside an empty shopping centre for two hours.

Pensioner Catherine Thorpe feared she was going to have to spend the night in Hartlepool's Middleton Grange Shopping Centre.

She was only rescued when she found an intercom system to contact security guards.

Centre bosses apologised and promised to review procedures to make sure it does not happen again.

Mrs Thorpe, of the town's Rossmere area, had been shopping at Iceland with her husband, Sidney, also 88, on Sunday. The retired cleaner said she asked him to fetch a trolley but, due to a misunderstanding, he went home.

She waited in the shop until it closed at 4pm and then decided to look for her husband.

After checking the toilets and the benches where Mr Thorpe often sits, she decided it was time to leave.

But, Mrs Thorpe found all the exits shut and it was not until almost two hours later that she was finally let out by guards.

She said: "I was quite frightened in there on my own and I was worried about Sidney. At one point my shopping bags were so heavy that I just left them on a bench. I thought, well, nobody's going to pinch them because there's no one here."

Centre manager Cormac Hamilton apologised saying: "It's really very unfortunate that this has happened and we should have picked her up to be honest. I can only apologise to the lady involved.

"In my time here I've never known anything like that before. We obviously need to review how we operate."