Dead blogger a foe, but premier pledges justice
MURDERED journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was Malta Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s biggest adversary, he said yesterday – but he vowed to track down and bring her killers to justice.
The centre-left premier, accused by the blogger’s son of being complicit in her death, attempted to shift the spotlight onto the main opposition Nationalist Party, saying it had been the focus of Galizia’s latest investigations.
“It is unthinkable in a country like Malta to die for your job – in Caruana Galizia’s case for what she wrote,” Muscat said.
“She was probably my biggest adversary. She attacked me from when I was opposition leader. “But that was her job.” He had called in the US’s FBI and European security services to find her killers, Muscat said.
Forensic experts from the Netherlands had already arrived on the island.
Galizia, who had been called a “one-woman Wikileaks”, was killed in a car bomb on Monday.
She had lately used her widely-read blog to make a series of detailed allegations of corruption in Muscat’s inner circle – some based on the Panama Papers data leak in 2015.
Muscat refused to speculate on who might be behind Galizia’s death, but said the easiest thing for him to do “would be to point the finger at the opposition, the leader of which was the subject of Daphne’s latest reports”.
He raised opposition leader Adrian Delia again, saying the blogger had accused him of money laundering, prostitution “and more”.
Muscat said Galizia had written about receiving threats from people in the opposition over the last month, but that he could not verify the claim.
Delia has called on Muscat to resign, accusing him of personally failing to safeguard the blogger’s life.
Muscat responded, saying he could not impose protection on someone who did not want it. –