On Wednesday 8th November at 4am in the morning we were awakened by a loud repetitive thumping noise and went out to see what was going on. The thumping was coming from the neighbour to our left, Mariano’s house, and sounded like someone was knocking the door down. We looked through our gate up the street and saw a partially obscured dark vehicle with a blue flashing light on the top and we thought it may be the police. We could not see any details of the vehicle or the registration number. At this point we had illuminated our house which caused the thumping to stop and the car to drive away.
At 1032am Mariano with a woman appeared at our gate and said the house had been burgled and had we heard or seen anything. We explained we had been disturbed at 4am by the noise and that there was a vehicle with a blue flashing light which disappeared when we put our house lights on. He asked if he could see our camera footage and we explained that there was nothing to see that could incriminate anybody as the picture is not that clear and the cars lights obscured any details. The reason we did not let him in is because we believe he is a member of organised crime.
This morning,, 14th November, Mariano appeared at our gate again and asked if he could come in to our house to see the camera footage and we refused. Amanda explained to him that the footage showed nothing that would assist in any enquiries. Amanda offered to allow the police to view the CCTV footage and he didn’t want the police involved. He said the police would not want to view our CCTV footage and would only want to go in his house, which seemed a ridiculous statement.
There are other cameras in the street which would probably have a better view of the car than we did, but he said the other neighbour’s camera had not got any footage.
Amanda showed him on our ipad a photo of our CCTV of the car and he agreed it was worthless.
After the conversation finished we checked our recording of the gate conversation with Mariano and it appears he took a photo of Amanda and we believe he will also have taken a voice recording.
We believe this was another attempt to obtain information that could be used in a detrimental manner in the future to make it look like, as they have on previous occasions, that we associate with a criminal network.