The mayor of Gżira has denied that rats seen around the gardens in the locality were linked to littering.
The council has two full-time employees maintaining the area and collecting rubbish, Conrad Borg Manche said, amid complaints of large rats spotted in and around the gardens and the children’s play park in Gżira.
The mayor instead speculated the problem may be connected to the lack of rainfall experienced in the past few months, insisting the locality faced the same issue two years ago following a very dry spell.
His comments follow a call for action from a concerned Ta’ Xbiex resident who posted images of rats spotted scurrying around the Gżira gardens yesterday morning. Katia Mifsud said this was a regular occurrence in the park, which is frequented by dog walkers and children.
Commenters responding to Ms Mifsud’s post blamed littering in the area as the cause for the rat problem.
“It starts from the public first. Rats come because they find food. If you all litter (sic) properly then they will disappear. Still putting some rat traps is good,” one said.
Ms Mifsud told Times of Malta she had been calling on the local council to act on the rat problem as she claimed she had been seeing them every day in the gardens since last summer.
She said she was concerned for the safety of children playing in the park and gardens, adding that she spotted around five rats, predominantly in the early morning or early in the evening.
“Children and parents and pets come here to play here every day and it’s full of rats and it seems no one wants to do something about it,” Ms Mifsud said in her post.
The resident said she contacted the local council three times in the past five months about the problem, the last time being three weeks ago.
“I called the council about three weeks ago to inform them again about the problem and they told me to contact the Health Department about this. I contacted them and they told me to instead to contact the Environmental Health Directorate.
“The directorate told me they would do something about it but there has been no action in the past three weeks since I called them,” she said.
The mayor provided reassurances that the council had increased its pest control efforts in the past three weeks after he personally received several pictures and videos of the rats from concerned residents.
“We carry out pest control on a continuous basis and put black boxes to capture the rats. We saw a rise in the numbers of rats in the past two to three weeks and so I instructed the council to employ a private company to resolve the problem quickly,” he said.