Modifications are impossible to hide because access to the mainframe is restricted to the force’s top brass. File photo: Matthew Mirabelli

Any tampering with police reports would be “instantly traceable and futile” because a record of all entries is kept at police headquarters, according to a senior police officer.

He was reacting to a report by MaltaToday that an internal police investigation had been launched into the erasure of details of the arrest of Stephen Smith, who was taken into custody after the Home Affairs Minister’s driver, PC Paul Sheehan, allegedly shot two rounds at his car last month.

The officer, who preferred not to be named and who worked on setting up the police incident reporting system (PIRS), said that any change to reports was logged in a server at police headquarters in Floriana. Such modifications, he added, would be impossible to hide because access to the mainframe was restricted to the force’s top brass.

“Logs are kept of every letter that is erased from a report, who does the erasing, where and when.

“It’s impossible to tamper with a report without leaving a trace,” he said, adding that past cases involving manipulation of police reports had quickly been resolved.

Questions to the police on whether any investigations had been launched into the alleged tampering remained unanswered at the time of writing.

In a statement released late in the afternoon, the police referred to what was being reported by the press about the November 19 incident. It said Acting Police Commissioner Ray Zammit “would like to clarify that every shred of evidence was being thoroughly investigated.

This was being done to ensure that such investigations would reveal the whole truth ”.

Meanwhile, the senior officer questioned the motives behind erasing sections of a police report.

He said officers knew that any attempt to erase information would be virtually useless because the original reports would remain stored in the depot mainframe.

“I can’t imagine what anyone would hope to achieve by this. If the report was manipulated it would be obvious who did it,” he said, adding that officers were the only people with access to the PIRS database.

Opposition leader Simon Busuttil yesterday referred to media reports on the alleged tampering, describing it as another indication of a cover up.

He also referred to a report in The Sunday Times of Malta that casings from the bullets allegedly fired by Mr Sheehan were removed from the crime scene before forensics officers had arrived.

A man close to Mr Sheehan has been interrogated on suspicion that he had tampered with the crime scene.

He is the same person suspected of having approached two witnesses who filmed the shooting and asked them for the footage.

When contacted, a spokeswoman for Dr Mallia described the media reports as “very worrying”. The minister, she added, was unaware of such facts, because he had been kept out of any investigations involving the incident in question.