Citizens rally to slain journalist’s cause
MALTA: Several thousand Maltese citizens rallied yesterday to honour an investigative journalist killed by a car bomb, but the prime minister and opposition leader who were chief targets of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s reporting stayed away from the gathering.
Participants at the rally in Malta’s capital, Valletta, placed flowers at the foot of a memorial to the 53-year-old reporter that sprang up opposite the law court building after her October 16 slaying.
Some wore T-shirts or carried placards emblazoned with words from Caruana Galizia’s final blog post: ‘‘There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate’' in the European Union nation of some 400,000 people.
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 Lawrence Cutajar. Some hurled tomatoes, cakes and coins against an enlarged photograph of the commissioner spread out on the street.
The homicide of a journalist who devoted her career to exposing wrongdoing in Malta and raised her three sons there united many of the nation’s oftsquabbling politicians, at least for a day. Caruana Galizia had repeatedly criticised police and judicial officials.
Malta’s two dominant political forces, the ruling Labour and opposition Nationalist parties, participated in the rally which was organised to press demands for justice in her slaying.
But Prime Minister Joseph Muscat told his Labour party’s radio station a few hours before the event’s start time that he wouldn’t attend because he knew the anti-corruption reporter’s family didn’t want him to be there.
‘‘I know where I should be and where I should not be. I am not a hypocrite and I recognise the signs.’'
Nationalist leader Adrian Delia also skipped the rally, saying he didn’t want to ‘‘stir controversy’'.
Caruana Galizia’s family has refused to endorse the government’s offer of a €1 million (NZ$1.69m) reward and full protection to anyone with information that leads to the arrest and prosecution of her killer or killers. Instead, the family, which includes a son who is an investigative journalist himself, has demanded that Muscat resign. –