Malta investigative scribe killed
VALLETTA: A Maltese investigative journalist who exposed the island nation’s links to offshore tax havens through the leaked Panama Papers was killed when a bomb exploded in her car, the prime minister said.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, 53, had just driven away from her home in Mosta, a large town on Malta’s main island, when the bomb went off, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said.
Galizia’s death resulted from a “barbaric attack” that also amounted to an assault on freedom of expression, Muscat said. He said the journalist “was one of my harshest critics, on a political and personal level” as he denounced her slaying.
One of the topics she examined was the content in the Panama Papers leaked in 2016. She wrote that Muscat’s wife, the country’s energy minister and the government’s chief-of-staff had offshore holdings in Panama to receive money from Azerbaijan.
Muscat and his wife, Michelle, denied they had companies in Panama. Caruana Galizia filed a police report two weeks ago saying she was receiving threats, law enforcement officials told Malta news outlets today.
The slain journalist had written a twice-weekly column for The Malta Independent since 1996 and wrote a blog.
A half hour before she was killed, she posted an item about a libel claim the prime minister’s chief of staff had brought against a former opposition leader over comments the latter made about corruption.