Killing exposes Malta’s underbelly
Tracking down potential suspects difficult given the grudges against journalist
VALLETTA, MALTA— The blast from the bomb planted in the rented Peugeot of Malta’s best-known investigative journalist was so powerful it took police investigators four days to collect body parts and wreckage scattered across sun-baked fields next to the road.
Tracking down potential suspects with deep grudges against the victim, Daphne Caruana Galizia, however, will take far longer.
“It is a very long list,” Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, one of the journalist’s many targets, said in an interview. “She was a very harsh critic of mine.”
The list of people whom Caruana Galizia offended and infuriated as a prolific journalist in this tiny Mediterranean island nation includes many members of Muscat’s ruling Labour Party as well as the leader of the centre-right opposition. Also on the list: the president of Azerbaijan and his family, executives of a Chinese electrical equipment manufacturer, foreign drug barons, an Iranian-born banker and people active in offshore tax havens such as Panama and the British Virgin Islands.
All of them were the targets, at one time or another, of Caruana Galizia’s relentless probing of the underbelly of the European Union’s smallest country, a nation that boasts Europe’s fastest-growing economy but has been hit by six car bombings in the past two years, all of them unsolved.
How a country that has in many ways been so successful could be the scene of such a macabre and brutal murder on a picturesque road only a half-hour’s drive from the capital, Valletta, has left many asking what went wrong.
In the absence of hard evidence, Maltese are grasping at wild coincidences and conspiracy theories.
The murder took place exactly five years to the hour after the dismissal of Malta’s former senior official in the European Union, the disgraced former health commissioner John Dalli. The murder, Dalli said, “had absolutely nothing” to do with his own troubles.
Several thousand Maltese citizens rallied Sunday to honour Caruana Galizia. Some wore T-shirts or carried placards emblazoned with words from Caruana Galizia’s final blog post: “There are crooks everywhere you look now.”
Police removed a banner describing Malta as a “Mafia state.”
Hundreds of participants later held a sit-in outside police headquarters, demanding the resignation of Malta’s police commissioner.
Dalli was another regular target of Caruana Galizia’s writing — “Everything she wrote about me was a lie,” he said — and yet another well-connected insider who, despite detailed allegations of corruption, has never been prosecuted in Malta.
Dalli, who in December filed a harassment complaint with the police against Caruana Galizia, said he “was very angry” when he heard she had been killed. “It basically removed my chances of exculpating myself from everything she said about me.”
Justin Borg-Barthet, a Maltese legal expert who lectures at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, said the legal system, built up during British colonial rule, has been so steadily eroded by political meddling and constant reshuffling of the police leadership that virtually nobody expects justice to be done in the case of the murdered journalist.
“Trust does not function as a reliable constitutional principle when people are untrustworthy,” he said.
Caruana Galizia, 53, had an insider’s grasp of that world. “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate,” she wrote in her last blog post Monday afternoon, just a half-hour before she left her family home by car to run errands and was blown to pieces. The bombing stunned Malta, where known criminals sometimes attack one another but where the streets are safe and violence against public figures is extremely rare. It also sent tremors through the European Union, which took in Malta as a member in 2004 and, at a time of deep disillusionment with the “European project” in Britain and elsewhere, has often pointed to Malta’s economic success as an example of how Europe can work.
Christian Peregin, the founder of an online news site, Lovin Malta, and an admirer of the dead journalist, said the killing had exposed a reality that Caruana Galizia had spent decades trying to uncover, a mission that won her a long list of enemies and scores of libel suits.
One of those who sued her this year — and got a court to freeze her bank accounts — is Malta’s economy minister, whom she enraged with a February report that he had been seen along with an aide in a brothel in the German town of Velbert.
The minister, who was visiting Germany on government business, insisted he had been attending a conference at the time of the reported sighting.
“Beneath the veneer of a successful, well-to-do European nation there is something darker here,” Peregin said. “Malta is between Europe and North Africa. We speak English and have very English traditions, but we also speak Maltese — basically a mix of Arabic and Italian — and our national psyche is always somewhere between these two very different worlds.”
This split has, in turn, helped shape and harden a deep and often passionate political divide between the Labour Party, which Caruana Galizia loathed, and the Nationalist Party. She used to support the Nationalists until a new leader took over, whom she described as being in cahoots with criminals because of his previous work as a lawyer on behalf of Maltese clients who she said ran a prostitution racket in London.
The Nationalist leader, Adrian Delia, was so angered by her articles, which included details of a secret offshore bank account he controlled, that he filed four complaints against her for defamation.
He dropped the cases after the killing and is now trying to position himself as her defender, demanding that the prime minister, Muscat, resign and take “political responsibility” for the car bomb.
Saviour Balzan, a veteran editor and longtime adversary, called Caruana Galizia a “spiteful snob” who revelled in ridiculing people she viewed as inferior, particularly those who supported the Labour Party.
When the party’s former leader, Dom Mintoff, died at 96 in 2012, Caruana Galizia rejoiced at his passing: She wrote in her blog, Running Commentary, “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah . . . may you rot in hell.”
She stirred such strong feelings that her killing even prompted cheers in some quarters. Ramon Mifsud, a police officer whom she had portrayed in her blog as a drunken habitué of bars and lap dancing clubs, celebrated her killing with a post on his Face- book page: “Everyone gets what they deserve, cow dung.” Suspended from the police force, he quickly deleted the message.
“She was certainly the best investigative journalist Malta has ever seen. However, she was at times also a tabloid trash writer, and did not always follow normal journalistic standards,” Ken Mifsud Bonnici, a Maltese legal adviser to the European Commission in Brussels, said, speaking in a personal capacity. Nevertheless, he added: “People do not get killed for publishing lies.”
Maltese news media reported that the bomb that killed Caruana Galizia was made from Semtex, the plastic explosive that brought down a Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Malta’s previous car bombings involved more easily obtained explosives and targeted known criminals or their associates.
The police commissioner, Lawrence Cutajar, the fifth person to hold Malta’s top law enforcement job in just four years, declined Thursday to comment on the kind of explosive used.
He was so evasive in his response to questions that local journalists left the event convinced that the case, like previous car bombings, would never be solved — despite the presence of investigators from the FBI and Dutch police.
With trust in the police so low, representatives of the island’s main news outlets filed a petition with a court in Valletta demanding that any information found by investigators on Caruana Galizia’s phone and computer relating to her sources be kept secret to protect their security.
“When a leading journalist — an institution — is killed and you don’t have any faith in the justice system, everyone becomes a suspect,” Peregin said. “We are all scared because we have no idea who killed her.
“It could be anyone she has written about over the last 30 years, or it could be a message to the Maltese press or the government: Watch out for your neck and accept our demands or we will do worse.”