A crazed panhandler, who smashed another straphanger in the face with a metal pipe, breaking his eye socket, apologized, according to newly released court papers.

“I’m sorry,” Geovannie Nieves, 35, told cops a day after the caught-on-video beatdown. “It’s a misunderstanding.”

Authorities nabbed him at a homeless shelter a day after the July 7 subway attack on Michael Vansluytman, 59, and took him to the precinct.

“Oh sh—t that’s me!” he allegedly said when he spotted his “Wanted” poster. “So that’s how you got me. I was in the news,” he added, according to the papers.

The defendant’s statements were released Thursday at his Manhattan Supreme Court arraignment, where he pleaded not guilty to two counts of assault.

Prosecutors say that when Vansluytman refused to give Nieves money, the defendant flew into a rage and whacked him in the face, fracturing his skull and eye socket. Nieves previously denied that the altercation had anything to do with money.