Between a riot and a rout

This has been quite a traumatic week for us. For many months we grumbled and complained that no progress was being registered in the investigations regarding the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

ngrima@independent.com.mt

All we had was the arrest of three people charged with being the material killers. Then, in the last few days, we have learned that there were structures and structures in the plot. From what we now know, there was at least one middleman between the material killers and whoever gave the order to kill the journalist. That is three levels.

The information in the public arena is still incomplete and far from satisfactory. Assuming that Yorgen Fenech was the person who ordered Daphne’s murder is quite incomprehensible. It is true Daphne wrote about the gas power station, Electrogas, the Azeri connection, etc. It is also true that, some weeks before her death, she received a cache of 700,000 emails from inside Electrogas but had not had the time to delve into them.

But Daphne wrote about a myriad other cases, from the Scoglitti link to stolen fuel from Libya, to Minister Chris Cardona’s secret predilections, to Italian Mafia links, etc., each of which could more plausibly make someone sufficiently hot under the collar to order her death.

Yorgen Fenech, then, is not just an individual but also a representative of one of Malta’s foremost companies, with wide-ranging interests and a variety of links and alliances with other leading companies. The investigation would therefore want to ascertain if the diverse levels of the holding had been involved.

Then, too, it may be that Mr Fenech is not the top of the pyramid that ordered Daphne’s murder but maybe shared the top levels with other hitherto unsuspected individuals.

All this is speculation, but it goes to show that there are still many gaps in our reading of the background. There may, for instance, have been more than one middleman. However, this reading seems to exclude the many stories we have been fed over the past months – ranging from the Italian Mafia to Libyan bandits.

Whatever, on Wednesday we were shocked to be told that Yorgen Fenech had been caught as he was apparently trying to escape from Malta. Even this carries within it so many still unresolved questions.

We later learned that he had resigned from all his positions in the Fenech companies. He had been out of Malta for weeks and months. He could have absconded in so many different ways. And when he came out of the Portomaso marina, his transponders were still on. Then someone said that the police had been informed by an unknown journalist that he was trying to escape.