A 30-year-old woman who was arrested at the boarding gate just as she was leaving Malta on Thursday pleaded not guilty to five separate charges of theft on Friday.
Mariyana Borisova, the unemployed Roma traveller from Bulgaria, had apparently taken a number of trips to Malta over the past months, returning to her homeland once her pickpocketing raids were done.
However, it appears that her last trip, during which she claimed to have been staying at a Buġibba hotel, tested her luck to the limit.
Police authorities, working on a number of CCTV footages, eventually managed to figure out the identity of the woman believed to be the prime suspect behind a number of thefts committed between March and May in different localities in Malta.
Information that this woman was about to leave the island led the police to Malta International Airport on Thursday where the suspect was tracked down just as soon as she was about to board an outbound flight.
On Friday, the woman pleaded not guilty to five separate charges of theft, starting off with the theft of a cash-filled envelope from a clothes shop in Republic Street back in March and the last one involving the theft of a wallet from Valletta last Monday.
Other thefts related to another wallet containing cash, credit cards and personal documents from a Maltese woman in Mosta last month. The alleged thief had then used the stolen credit card to withdraw €500 from an ATM in Mosta.
The woman had also allegedly stolen another wallet in Valletta but had later that same day, on May 23, been thwarted in her attempt to withdraw cash from an ATM in Floriana, using a credit card found in the stolen wallet.
The alleged thief pleaded not guilty to all charges and was remanded in custody by duty magistrate Yana Micallef Stafrace since no request for bail was made during the arraignment.
Just two days ago, two female Bulgarian gypsies were each handed an 18-month effective jail term after pleading guilty to similar pickpocketing offences.
Inspector Jeffrey Scicluna prosecuted. Lawyers Charlon Gouder and Shazoo Ghaznavi were defence counsel.