Death of a blogger casts shadow over murky Malta
Daphne Caruana Galizia posted two items last Monday on her popular blog, one ridiculing Malta’s opposition leader for having rounded shoulders, the other denouncing a senior government official as a “crook”.
A typical morning’s work done, she set off in her white Peugeot 108 to run an errand, but barely made it past her front gate before a bomb tore through the car, throwing it into an adjacent field and killing her instantly.
Her death shocked Malta, the smallest nation in the European Union, which has been engulfed by a wave of graft scandals, including accusations of money laundering and influence peddlingin government — all of which have been denied.
Caruana Galizia exposed many of these cases and was loved by her readers as a fearless, anti-corruption crusader. Critics saw her as a muck-raking fantasist.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, her main target, promised everything would be done to find her killers, but friends andfamily have low expectations that anyone will be brought to justice, seeing murky powers behind a very professional hit.
“She had to be done away with because she couldn’t be bought off,” said Manuel Delia, a blogger who described the 53year-old Caruana Galizia as his mentor.
“She was a polemicist, a provocateur and a critic. She was unique in Malta.”
A trail-blazing journalist, Caruana Galizia was one of Malta’s first political columnists in the 1990s at a time when its newspapers were staid and maledominated.
The confines of established media frustrated her and in 2008 she set up her blog, Running Commentary.