YOUTHS with weapons have attacked the headquarters of the Conservative Party in York.

CCTV footage shows two youths with nunchucks smash the window of the Poppleton Road building.

Thom Wiseman, chairman of York Conservatives, said this was the fifth attack on the property in the last 12 months, and he hoped the video footage would help trace the culprits.

He said: "There are so many times you can brush it off as random, but by the fifth time it looks like a blatant attack.

"The people in the video are actually quite young and it was done with nunchucks so whether it's random kids doing the attacking or not, but it seems unlikely people will be walking around on a night carrying nunchucks with them."

Mr Wiseman said each of the five attacks had led to a window being replaced at a cost to the party.

He said: "It's not cheap. It's just under £250 which is what our insurance excess is so it's costing us money we can't afford, really. That's coming out of party funds from this association, and we're not the richest association in the world.

"We can't let random attacks like this go on unpunished so hopefully we can find the people who did it. Each time we have reported it to the police and haven't had much support from them they seem to treat it as random vandalism but clearly after five attempts in a year it's not random."

A spokesman for North Yorkshire Police said the incident was being investigated, and the CCTV footage would be used by officers to try and identify the suspects.