Crusading journalist’s murder followed threats

MALTA: Malta’s prime minister has appealed for national unity after the murder of a campaigning journalist who had accused his government of corruption.

Daphne Caruana Galizia, 53, achieved fame and notoriety for investigative reporting laced with scathing commentary about allegedly corrupt officials and businessmen. She was killed yesterday when a bomb blew up her car.

Police said the bomb went off while she was driving near the village of Bidnija, in northern Malta.

Joseph Muscat, the prime min- ister, denounced her murder as a ‘‘barbaric attack on press freedom’’.

‘‘I will not rest until I see justice done in this case. Our country deserves justice,’’ he said in a televised statement in which he also paid tribute to the journalist as ‘‘one of my harshest critics, on a political and personal level’’.

Adrian Delia, the leader of the opposition, called the killing ‘‘a political murder’’.

No-one has claimed responsibility for the attack. Malta television reported that Caruana Galizia filed a report with police two weeks ago, saying she had been receiving threats.

Caruana Galizia’s blog, Running Commentary, was one the most widely read websites in Malta and led the investigation of corruption allegations stemming from revelations in the so-called Panama Papers leak.

The blog was known for its pursuit of cases of alleged corruption, and its incendiary, sometimes highly personal, comments.

Earlier this year, Politico magazine listed her as one of the 28 men and women ‘‘making and shaking Europe’’ for her unrelenting crusade against what she saw as Malta’s culture of ‘‘cronyism’’ and opaque government.

In 2016 she reported that Konrad Mizzi, the former energy minister, and Keith Schembri, Muscat’s chief of staff, were named in the Panama Papers leak as owners of offshore companies. Both men denied wrongdoing.

This year, Caruana Galizia claimed that documents from a small Malta-based bank showed Muscat’s wife was the beneficial owner of a company in Panama, and that large sums of money had been moved between the company and bank accounts in Azerbaijan.

Muscat called – and won – early elections in June as a vote of confidence to counter Caruana Galizia’s allegations of corruption.

In her final post, published hours before she died, she bemoaned the lack of progress in prosecuting alleged corruption cases. The last line read: ‘‘There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.’’

– Telegraph Group