Last year 35 convicted criminals or crime suspects cut off their ankle monitoring device and ducked out of public view, the Telegraaf said on Thursday.

The figures come from the probation service, which supervises people who have been given an electronic tag.

‘It works well for 98% of wearers,’ probation service chief Sjef van Gennip told the paper. Some 1,600 people are currently fitted with an electronic tag, most of whom are in the final stretch of their sentence.

Of the 35 people who cut off the tag, three were murderers, 11 had convictions for armed robbery, one was a convicted rapist and three had been jailed for drugs offences, the Telegraaf said.  The probation service does not know how many of them were eventually returned to prison.

Electronic tagging was introduced in the Netherlands in 1997.