Investigator who warned me about her own murder
As journalist who made damning allegations against Malta’s PM (a chum of Blair) dies in car bomb attack . . .
At 2.35PM on Monday, a journalist called Daphne Caruana Galizia filed her latest article alleging endemic corruption in Malta’s government.
‘there are crooks everywhere you look now,’ read its final line. ‘the situation is desperate.’
Less than half an hour later, Galizia, 53, a prominent local figure thanks to her sensational allegations about the EU nation’s ruling class, left her family home in the rural north of the island in a Peugeot 108 hire car.
the married mother- of-three had driven just a few hundred yards towards the nearby town of Mosta when there was a sudden bang.
According to an eye-witness driving in the opposite direction, her car immediately caught fire. Seconds later, a second explosion ripped through the vehicle and sent it careering into a field. It was soon engulfed in flames.
Galizia didn’t stand a chance. In a moving and at times graphic Facebook post, her son Matthew told yesterday how he found her dead at the scene, shortly after 3 o’clock.
‘I am never going to forget running around the inferno in the field, trying to figure out a way to open the door, the horn of the car still blaring, screaming at two policemen who turned up with a single fire extinguisher, to use it,’ he wrote. ‘they stared at me. “I’m sorry, there is nothing we can do,” one of them said.
‘ I looked down and there were my mother’s body parts all around me. I realised they were right. It was hopeless.’
Matthew has dubbed the apparent car bombing a political ‘assassination’ — and he may very well be right.
For so deep is the scandal currently surrounding Malta’s government that it’s tricky to see how his mother’s killing can be explained any other way.
the sad truth is that this Mediterranean holiday island — to which thousands of British tourists flock every year — looks increasingly like a gangster state: a haven for dirty money run by dodgy politicians, a corrupt judiciary and a partisan police force, where criminals call the shots and critical journalists are not just silenced, but murdered, with apparent impunity.
FARCICALLY, the magistrate appointed to lead the investigation into Galizia’s killing had to be sacked almost immediately after it emerged she was a government loyalist and the subject of critical articles on Galizia’s blog.
then an officer in the island’s supposedly independent police force, ramon Mifsud, celebrated the murder on Facebook, declaring: ‘Everyone gets what they deserve, cow dung! Feeling happy.’ (He was suspended pending an inquiry yesterday.)
I was discussing the issue of alleged corruption with Daphne Caruana Galizia only a few weeks ago when I was writing an article for the Mail on the Maltese government. She compared Malta to Sicily or russia, where organised criminals hold great sway and hostile voices can be brutally silenced.
At the time, I wondered if she was exaggerating. Now, tragically, she has been proved right, joining the likes of Ireland’s Veronica Guerin and the russian Anna Politkovskaya in the annals of courageous female journalists who appear to have been murdered for seeking to speak the truth.
I’d contacted her to find out more about Malta’s Labour Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat, 43, and his growing friendship with political soul-mate, tony Blair.
Britain’s former Prime Minister and his wife, Cherie, had recently interrupted their summer holiday to pay a visit to Malta lasting less than 24 hours, in which they dined with the politician and his glamorous wife Michelle.
In the UK, the trip sparked speculation that Blair was on manoeuvres to thwart Brexit — since he and Muscat (who are both avowed remainers) had just mounted a seemingly co- ordinated Pr offensive in which they publicly speculated that Britain’s departure from the EU ‘might not happen’.
Daphne Galizia, a Maltese native, took a different view. She told me the real significance of the duo’s meeting (chronicled via a cheesy photo on twitter) lay in both men’s curious links to the dictatorship of Azerbaijan.
Blair, who has devoted much of his post-Number 10 career to enriching himself via consultancy work for corrupt and repressive autocrats, made a lucrative visit to the former Soviet satellite in 2009, shortly after leaving office. there he met the country’s leader Ilham Aliyev, a kleptocrat notorious for human rights abuses whose regime has rigged elections, jailed opponents, closed opposition news outlets, and threatened dissidents with torture and rape.
In a major Pr coup for the despot, Blair was paid a reported £90,000 to speak there. Later, in 2014, he signed a lucrative deal to lobby on behalf of private oil companies wishing to build a 2,000mile gas pipeline between Azerbaijan and Southern Europe in a deal vigorously backed by the Aliyev regime, whose members stood to enrich themselves. Muscat boasts equally murky ties to the dictatorship, almost all of which had been single-handedly brought to public attention thanks to dogged and at times very brave reporting by Galizia.
Central to this scandal is last year’s so- called Panama Papers affair, in which 11 million files were leaked from a law firm, Mossack Fonseca, which specialises in helping very rich people hide assets from tax authorities.
the documents revealed that two of Muscat’s allies, then energy minister Konrad Mizzi and chiefof-staff Keith Schembri, each used the firm to set up two mysterious corporate entities in the central American tax haven.
then, in April, Galizia alleged on her internet blog that Muscat’s wife Michelle was secretly a shareholder in a third company — similar to the first two — named in the Panama Papers.
Galizia claimed that all three firms had been established to launder money corruptly channelled from Azerbaijan.
According to her blog — whose claims, it should be stressed, have always been (and continue to be) vigorously denied — Prime Minister Muscat and his allies had received the cash by way of kickbacks from Azerbaijan’s leader Ilham Aliyev and his associates.
they were paid, she alleged, for giving Azerbaijan’s state energy companies lucrative concessions in Malta, including an 18-year deal (signed in 2014) to supply Malta’s gas, and a second agreement to build a power station.
THESE allegations led to the launch of five investigations by Maltese magistrates, all of which are ongoing (one is digging into the financial affairs of Muscat and his wife). they also prompted Muscat to hold a snap election in June, which he won narrowly — thanks partly to a videotaped endorsement from tony Blair.
In the months that followed, Galizia was deluged with dozens of libel claims by senior figures in Malta’s Labour Party. But she ploughed on. the question now, of course, is if she was murdered, who is to blame?
yesterday Muscat said he was appalled at the ‘barbaric attack on a person and on freedom of expression in this country’ and vowed to find the perpetrators.
But opponents aren’t holding their breath. Simon Busuttil, a former leader of Malta’s opposition, and close friend of Galizia, said her supporters had lost all trust in the ability of authorities to catch her killer.
He told me last night: ‘ Over a very long time, I have been saying, and Daphne has said, that the rule of law is being systematically undermined in this country.
‘ In return, we have been ridiculed, laughed at, criticised and ignored by the government.
‘I am devastated that it has taken a political assassination, for us to be proven right.’
For this was, tragically, a murder foretold.