Malta politicians miss rally honoring journalist killed

VALLETTA, MALTA — Several thousand Maltese citizens rallied Sunday to honor 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-yearold reporter that sprang up opposite the law court building after her slaying Monday.

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.”

The violent and malicious death of a journalist who devoted her professional career to exposing wrong-doing in Malta and raised her three sons there united many of the nation’s oft-squabbling politicians.

Malta’s two dominant political forces, the ruling Labor and opposition Nationalist parties, participated in the rally organized to press demands for justice in her slaying.

But Prime Minister Joseph Muscat told his Labor 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 recognize the signs,” Muscat said, adding that he supported the rally’s goals of call for justice and national unity.

Nationalist leader Adrian Delia also skipped the rally, saying he didn’t want to “stir controversy.”

Muscat and Delia, while fierce political rivals, have another thing in common: Both brought libel lawsuits against Caruana Galizia. Delia withdrew his pending libel cases last week after her killing.