People mistook ragged homeless man for missing Briton Tom Stewart
Fourteen people who went missing last year have still not been found while the total number of persons still missing since the 1970s is over 260, although only six are Maltese. Police Inspector JOSEPH BUSUTTIL from the Vice Squad tells Neil Camilleri that
Many people who called the police saying they had spotted missing Briton Tom Stewart last year had actually seen a homeless man who looked somewhat like him, according to a police inspector.
Inspector Joseph Busuttil, from the Vice Squad, told The Malta Independent that several reports that came in around July of last year were all cases of mistaken identity.
Yet the reports of a man with ragged clothes and a bleeding leg had Mrs Phyllis Stewart worried that her husband, who is diabetic, was in series need of help.
“If you didn’t know Mr Stewart, you could easily mistake the two,” Inspector Busuttil said. “People’s descriptions of this bearded, dirty homeless person were consistent with someone who had been roaming the streets for a number of weeks but it turned out that the person they saw was not Mr Stewart.”
The inspector says the Briton’s disappearance remains one of the most mysterious cases he has ever worked on. “You would think he’d have been found by now, but there is no trace of him.”
Inspector Busuttil also insisted that he has always kept Mrs Stewart and the British High Commission in the loop. He showed us a long email exchange that took place with the woman. Mrs Stewart had claimed lack of support by the police but the inspector said the force was doing all it could. “I understand how hard this must be on her and I don’t blame her for anything,” the inspector says.
Data which was recently tabled in Parliament shows that there were 837 missing person reports in 2016 but the number of people actually involved was much less, according to Inspector Busuttil, who is one of three inspectors in the Vice Squad. “A number of reports could be about the same person,” he says. “I remember we had one case, a teenage girl who lives in a care home. She was reported missing three times in the space of a few hours. She went out in the evening and failed to return. We found her and returned her to the care home but she escaped again after an hour. She repeated the whole thing after we had found her for the second time,” the Inspector chuckles.
But missing person reports sometimes lead investigators down a more grisly route. “Sometimes the search ends with the discovery of a body and a suicide note.”
Inspector Busuttil says the Malta Police Force acts on missing person reports immediately. “Unlike other countries, we do not wait for 24 or 48 hours because the first hours may be the most crucial. There have been occasions when we found the person we were looking for literally standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to take the plunge. The outcome would not have been so positive had we not started looking for them immediately.”
Missing persons may not always have suicidal tendencies but the police start investigating immediately for other reasons, including the possibility that the person might get on a plane and fly out of the country.
There is, in fact, a rather long checklist that officers have to tick off before they start to worry. “We check all hospitals, Mount Carmel, the lock-up, the airlines and the Sicily ferry service. We send a picture of the missing person and the necessary information to all our branches, including the districts. We also check for recent bank transactions and check CCTV footage if we find signs of activity, the social services and the Agency for Welfare of Asylum Seekers in case the person is a migrant. We also try phone localisation, check for recent internet activity, such as Facebook, and speak to Transport Malta, to see if a bus card was used. If they have a scheduled appointment at the hospital or any other entity, we go there
We do not use the media unnecessarily because people might get used to seeing missing person reports and become desensitised. At the same time, when we use the media, it means that the case is more serious and the checklist has not led us to finding the person
and let them come to us.”
Inspector Busuttil says that in one case, some two years ago, an individual who had gone missing but who the police knew was living in the St Paul’s Bay area was found after his picture was distributed to all shops and takeaways in the area.
The inspector says if none of these approaches work, an appeal for information is made through the media. “We do not use the media unnecessarily because people might get used to seeing missing person reports and become desensitised. At the same time, when we use the media, it means that the case is more serious and the checklist has not led us to finding the person.”
Officers investigating missing person reports have to be “creative,” Inspector Busuttil says. In some cases, the army and the Civil Protection Department are roped in to help. One such instance was the search for Mike Mansholt, a German teenager who was found dead beneath the Dingli Cliffs. It is believed he fell over the edge with his bicycle. His body was located more than a week after he had gone missing, in a search involving sniffer dogs, helicopters and many volunteers.
Inspector Busuttil says the disappearance of British national Tom Stewart from Mount Carmel Hospital in May 2016 remains one of the most mysterious cases. Mr Stewart, a diabetic, jumped over a perimeter wall, never to be seen again. The police had received several reports that a disheveled and confused Mr Steward had been seen walking barefoot on the Mosta-Lija road but it turned out that the man was a homeless person who resembled the Briton.
But the worst case in Inspector Busuttil’s memory is the gruesome discovery of the bodies of Mario Camilleri, known as ‘lImnieħru’, and his son Mario Junior. What started as a search for two missing persons turned into a full-blown double-murder investigation. While the bodies were being exhumed from a Birżebbuġa field, forensic officers found a third body, belonging to taxi driver Matthew Zahra, who had disappeared some months before.
But the majority of missing person cases are much less sinister, the Inspector explains. “The majority of reports are about naughty care home girls who run away for a few days. Most of these girls are found, in the end.” The statistics show that over 600 cases filed in 2016 were about missing females, most of them teenagers. The inspector says he does not know why girls go missing more than boys. “Perhaps they are naughtier,” he quips.
The majority of missing persons who are not found, the inspector says, are irregular migrants who leave Malta illegally. In fact, out of 260 people who have been missing since the 1970s, only six are Maltese. Over a third are Somali nationals. In one case involving an escaped migrant, the police found him on Facebook, with a profile picture showing him sipping beer near the Fontana di Trevi.”
Some people, including Maltese nationals, might flee the country for myriad reasons, including unpaid debts or trouble with some nasty people. The Inspector recounts the case of a Maltese man, who had been missing for several years. “His file came up for review so I ran a simple Google search and found that he had been jailed in Australia over a number of crimes. Until then his family had no idea was still alive.”
Some of the people who have disappeared without a trace over the past few years include young Theo Bugeja, the only person who was never found after the Simshar tragedy, a Chinese woman who was swept out to sea in Gozo in 2015 and two French people who disappeared in stormy seas near Xlendi two years earlier.
The inspector says there is nothing to suggest that disappearances are linked to more serious crimes, but there was one case where a human trafficker, a person who had smuggled some migrants into Malta to work for him, filed a missing person report.
Despite the fact that the majority of cases are not serious, the sheer number of them keeps the Vice Squad occupied. And this particular police section also deals with human trafficking, child abuse, sexual offences, domestic violence, hate crime, elderly abuse and illegal gambling. “You can never have enough resources. We try to be proactive. The more resources we have the more proactive we can be,” the Inspector says.
You can never have enough resources. We try to be proactive. The more resources we have the more proactive we can be