A man found it difficult not to laugh when an electronic tag was fitted to his prosthetic leg.

Ashton Sammut was fitted with the tag and made subject to a four-week curfew after being caught stealing.

The 29-year-old lost his leg in a motorbike accident in 2011 and now has a removable prosthetic leg.

Following his original sentence hearing after his guilty plea, Mr Sammut was deemed unsuitable for unpaid work due to the nature of his disability.

When asked by the Capita worker who was fitting the tag whether it mattered which leg it was fitted to, Mr Sammut said: “I thought it was a joke in bad taste.

“The whole reason for the curfew was that I only have one leg and I couldn’t do the community service.

“Then I thought, ‘What the Hell. Let’s see what he does’.”

“He lifted up the false leg and warned me he needed to roll down the sock because the tag had to go on the skin.

“I thought he’d realise then, but he fitted the tag and asked me how it felt.”

Mr Sammut, whose leg has an orange outer layer made of foam, was then advised to walk around his home to test the device was working properly.

He said: “I had to force myself not to laugh. I could have told him, but I’ve let it go this far to highlight how ridiculous it is.”

Mr Sammut’s tag is due to come off on November 14.

The dad-of-one from Grays told The Sun newspaper that if he was a serious criminal, he could have been breaking curfew whenever he wanted.

Capita runs the Electronic Monitoring Service for tagging.

An Electronic Monitoring Service spokesman said: “This is a rare situation, among tens of thousands of tags being fitted annually, where strict processes were obviously not followed during the fitting process.

“We have already taken appropriate action to rectify it.”

When selected by the Ministry of Justice as the preferred bidder for the electronic monitoring contract in 2011, Capita chief executive Paul Pindar said: “When fully live, this is expected to be the largest, single and most advanced ‘tagging’ system in the world.

“It will be run to the highest possible standards of governance and transparency.”

An electronic monitoring tag is used to monitor curfews and conditions of a court or prison order.

Tags are most commonly attached to an ankle and sends the wearer’s location data to a base unit that is decided in court, which will usually be the wearer’s home address. The base unit constantly checks that the wearer is present at that address during the curfew hours, if not it will send an alert to a monitoring centre and the breach will be dealt with accordingly.