Sliema burglary spike: Resident recalls ‘zombie’ shock as island’s safest town faces break-in wave

‘I walked in like a zombie’: Sliema resident recalls walking into burgled home
By Hot Malta Staff

Sliema – The front door was ajar, the lock splintered like a cracked seashell. Inside, drawers hung open like broken jaws, cushions gutted, the air thick with the metallic scent of violation. “I walked in like a zombie,” recalls 34-year-old Maria Attard, her voice still trembling two weeks after the break-in at her Victorian-era townhouse on Triq it-Tonn. “For a split second I thought a tramuntana had blown through, then I saw my nanna’s lace tablecloth trampled on the floor and I knew strangers had been inside my blood.”

Attard’s story is chillingly familiar across Malta’s once-sleepy seaside towns. Sliema—once the island’s genteel summer retreat where families left doors unlatched for the evening breeze—has become the nation’s burglary hotspot. Police statistics released last month show residential break-ins in the Sliema-St Julian’s coastal strip up 28 % over 2022, outstripping even dense inland localities like Birkirkara. Officers blame a cocktail of short-term rental keys left under flowerpots, Instagram geo-tags announcing empty apartments, and easy ferry getaways to Sicily. But for residents, the spike feels like a cultural fracture.

“Growing up in the 1990s we’d sleep on the roof in August, doors wide open,” says 62-year-old neighbour Raymond Zahra, who’s lived on the same street for five decades. “Today I triple-lock before walking to the kiosk for pastizzi.” The shift gnaws at Malta’s tightly-woven village identity, where neighbours were once honorary cousins and where the festa season still sees band marches threading through narrow streets. “When burglary becomes routine, trust is the first thing stolen,” Zahra shrugs.

Attard, a UX designer who returned from London three years ago to “reclaim island life”, had embraced Sliema’s hybrid charm—Art-Nouveau façades shoulder-to-shoulder with sushi bars and language schools. She chose the ground-floor maisonette precisely because it felt “lived-in and safe”, its limestone doorstep still bearing the traditional carved cross meant to bless all who enter. On the night of 14 May she spent two hours at a book-launch in Valletta, posting a single Instagram story tagged #VallettaLitFest. She now believes it signalled an empty flat. “Back in London I’d never post in real time,” she says ruefully. “Malta lulled me.”

Returning at 11.07 pm, she noticed the hallway light on—she’s adamant she switched it off. “I actually said ‘hello’, half-expecting my cat to answer,” she laughs bitterly. Instead she found every room “turned inside out”. Jewellery inherited from her mother—filigree Maltese crosses, a miniature għonnella pendant—was gone. So was the €300 cash she kept for fishermen who still knock door-to-door with the day’s catch. Most painful was the theft of three hand-painted Easter candles her family carried every Maundy Thursday since 1978. “They’re worthless to anyone else, but they held my entire childhood,” she says, eyes glassy.

Police arrived within 12 minutes—credit where due, Attard stresses—but conceded the perpetrators were probably “in-and-out in six”. CCTV from a neighbouring language school shows two hooded figures slipping into a waiting taxi on Tower Road; the car’s plates were cloned. Investigators say the modus operandi matches at least nine other Sliema burglaries this year: pinpoint social-media surveillance, swift grab of portable valuables, exit via ride-hail to avoid parked-car footage.

The psychological residue lingers. Attard hasn’t slept a full night since; she jumps at the creak of the old elevator shaft she once found charming. She’s installed motion-sensor lights and a smart doorbell, yet says the worst sound is now “the silence when I come home—no welcoming meow, just dread”. She’s joined a newly-formed neighbourhood WhatsApp group, Sliema Watch, which swaps suspicious-loiterer alerts and petitions the local council for more lamp-post cameras. Within days the group swelled to 460 members, a testament to how deeply the burglaries have rattled the community.

Mayor Graziella Attard Previ cautions against “fortress mentality”, arguing the answer is “eyes on the street, not blinds drawn”. She’s lobbying for a return of the klandestini—community beat officers scrapped in 2018—and for rental platforms to delay guest check-ins by 24 hours to prevent real-time vacancy broadcasts. Meanwhile, locals are reviving old customs: asking the milk-delivery van to keep bottles on the step as decoy signals, organising rotas to switch on each other’s fairy-lights when travelling. It’s a digital-age remix of the ħanut-owner who once swept your porch if you were away.

For Attard, healing means reclaiming ritual. Last Sunday she carried a new candle—plain, store-bought—into St Julian’s parish church. “I’m starting over,” she says. “But I’ll never post my whereabouts again. In Malta, paradise can’t be taken for granted.”