Teachers at the Saint Margaret College Middle School in Cospicua have complained that they were treated like suspects on Tuesday when police investigating a theft from the school asked for their fingerprints.

The shocked teachers contacted their union, the Malta Union of Teachers, which wrote to Education Minister Evarist Bartolo demanding an investigation.

The union told the minister that the police “came up with the brilliant idea of taking fingerprints of all school personnel to apparently be able to eliminate suspects”.

“Proper police investigations would have led to a suspect, or perhaps a limited number of suspects, and these would have been investigated. The methodology proposed, on the other hand, appears to suggest that the police have not carried out a proper investigation and are treating all educators at this school, together with all the rest of the staff, as suspects,” the MUT said in its letter.

The police came up with the brilliant idea of taking fingerprints of all school personnel to apparently be able to eliminate suspects

The MUT added that whatever the case, “such measures are hardly what is expected in a democratic society”.

Sources said that the teachers found police officers inside the school asking them to submit their fingerprints.

But sources close to the police said that was not how things were done. “We simply informed them of where the investigation was leading us and that we needed to narrow our search,” the sources said.

They said that what the police had done was “routine” and that this was “normal practice” during an investigation, especially one related to theft.

Details of what was actually stolen were not provided by the police when they were asked, nor did they reply to questions about the fingerprinting exercise.