A Swieqi vandal, caught on tape, admitted to damaging a resident’s car but insisted he had “no idea what he had done”.

Michelle Sullivan told the Times of Malta she had walked into the new Swieqi police station to tell a police officer that she had come home to find her car’s wing mirror had been smashed, only for the perpetrator to walk in right behind her and confess.

She said the vandal, a Finnish gaming employee, walked into the station as she was filing her report and basically described the same incident she had just finished reporting.

“The policewoman said ‘yes sir, this is the woman whose car you damaged’ – what are the chances?” Ms Sullivan said, still surprised this had happened.

Allegedly the vandal said he had been drinking since around 3pm and had no memory of the incident which happened some hours later.

Unruly people roam the streets after night out drinking

He had only been informed of it after Ms Sullivan uploaded the CCTV footage to Facebook and the remorseful vandal’s landlord contacted him to ask what was going on.

“He said he was mortified by what he saw himself doing in the video and agreed to pay the €400 damage to my car,” Ms Sullivan said.

Although it was a coincidence that the vandal had walked in behind her, Ms Sullivan said the damage was not a one-off. Swieqi residents have been plagued by such unruly people who roam the streets on their way back home from a night out drinking, usually in the early hours of the morning.

In fact, Ms Sullivan said that just 48 hours later she was awoken by a loud bang near her residence at around 2am.

A quick search of her cameras the next morning revealed a group of youths walking past a parked car – not her own – when one of them violently kicked the stationary vehicle.

“It happens all the time here in Swieqi, it’s a really terrible situation,” she said.

Swieqi mayor Noel Muscat said he expected the incidents to increase over the summer months, as had become the annual trend.

Incidents, he said, ranged from damage to cars to people using front gardens as toilets, or “senseless” graffiti.

He hoped newly installed CCTV cameras across the locality would act as a deterrent and said they had already had a number of requests for footage from victims of hit-and-run incidents.