by Carlo Bonini
I do not appreciate your threat to sue me in London. The reason you are doing it is not because ‘most of your business is there’. Most of your business comes from shady people in Russia and the Middle East, with the occasional Vietnamese MP thrown in. The reason you are threatening to sue me in London is because you imagine that I am somebody from the sticks who is frightened of the words ‘London’, ‘UK courts’, and ‘high costs’.
The legal menaces were by no means the gravest dangers. Daphne was no fool. She knew the risks she was taking. One time, in the middle of the night, tyres had been stacked against the back of her house, packed with bottles of petrol and set on fire – but one of her boys spotted the fire and raised the alarm. But she also knew the risks of shutting up, of letting the scandals continue unchallenged and, for her, that was the greater danger.
Daphne and her husband Peter had three sons, Matthew, Andrew, and Paul. All three boys often worked abroad, but on that fateful weekend in October 2017, Matthew was in Malta. After Sunday lunch with his parents, an afternoon swim, and an evening drink with friends, he drove back home in the rented Peugeot in the early hours of Monday morning. He could have opened the gate and driven the car right inside his parents’ driveway. But it was late and he was tired. So he parked the car just outside the house. This was not a particularly rare occurrence. The car was left outside just as often as it was driven inside.
It would have made little difference if Matthew had driven the car into the driveway. The perimeter wall of the property is too low to be a serious deterrent and Daphne had lost the two guard dogs she kept to alert her of intruders. Santino, Daphne’s loyal Neapolitan mastiff, had died in 2016. Tony, her Staffordshire bull terrier had been poisoned three months previously and was so sick he was no longer an effective guard dog. The yelp of Hanno, the puppy Daphne got that summer, was no replacement for the barking of fully-grown guard dogs. Daphne’s house that October 2017 was as vulnerable to intrusion as it had ever been.
The assassins got to the car while the family slept. They used a device to trick the central locking system into unlocking the doors and then placed a small bomb underneath the driver’s seat, hidden from view. The trigger would be a text message to a mobile phone attached to the bomb. The burner phone, a disposable device purposefully not registered in anyone’s name, was turned on just after 2am, and 13 hours later it would receive its one and only message.
Evidence in pre-trial hearings under Malta’s legal system can be reported. The magistrate heard that either Alfred Degiorgio or Vincent Muscat were watching Daphne’s home at 2.30pm on Monday afternoon. The spotter is believed to have been on a bluff overlooking the road down which Daphne was most likely to drive. As she drove her rented grey Peugeot onto the road, the spotter warned the triggerman.
— She is out. No, wait a minute, she’s gone back inside.
Daphne had forgotten the cheques signed by Peter which she had to take to the bank to exchange for cash. She needed to pay the monthly car rental bill and her bank accounts had been frozen as a result of the court order obtained by Economy Minister Chris ‘I wasn’t at the brothel’ Cardona and his aide in their libel action. So she was using signed cheques from her husband’s account and cashing them in personally. It was the best solution to her state of legally-enforced financial penury. She said goodbye to her eldest son and drove off again.
— She’s coming back out. It’s time.
The spotter’s signal went out to sea, several hundred metres beyond the mouth of Valletta’s harbour. There, bobbing up and down on his fishing boat, was the triggerman, reportedly George Degiorgio. He stayed just within range of the mobile phone antennae to be able to send and receive messages. Malta is a crowded place. The open sea was the only place you could act without being seen.
His job was simple. Send a message by SMS to a number. The number would detonate the bomb in the witch’s white car.
As assassins go, the alleged triggerman was a moron, if the evidence against him is to be believed. Or a man who believed he could act with impunity. That morning he had taken his brother’s boat, the Maya, and had spent the day out at sea. He had three phones with him. His own, a second ‘walkie-talkie’ burner phone he used exclusively to talk to his brother Alfred and his associate, Vincent Muscat, and a third burner phone he would only use to send the text that would trigger the bomb. The three ‘walkie-talkie’ phones they used to talk to each other were all bought on 19 August 2017 along with their SIM cards.
Was the order to kill Daphne given on that date?
On 16 October 2017, while out at sea, George Degiorgio realised he had run out of credit on the second ‘walkie-talkie’ burner phone. So he used his personal phone to call a friend to top it up. The friend was out hunting and could not help so, at 9.01am, George called a second friend who could. The phone was topped up with €5 and George could talk to his brother and Vincent Muscat on their own secret ‘walkie-talkie’ network. At 2.59pm George sent a message from the the third burner phone, or kill phone, to a SIM card which went off signal instantly. That SIM card went up in the explosion which killed Daphne Caruana Galizia.
The explosion was loud. Matthew and some of Daphne’s neighbours in the hamlet heard it. On the Maya, George Degiorgio was listening in on the ‘walkie-talkie’ phone held by Alfred Degiorgio or Vincent Muscat on the bluff overlooking the murder scene. He would have heard the bomb go off.
At 3.30pm George Degiorgio sent another text to his wife. It was later retrieved by police and said:
— Open a bottle of wine for me, baby.
Moron.
What the three did not know was that George Degiorgio was being investigated by Malta’s security service who suspected him of other, unrelated criminal activities. His personal mobile phone was being tapped. His two calls requesting a top-up to the ‘walkie-talkie’ phone were recorded. Those calls alerted the Maltese intelligence service to the ‘walkie-talkie’ network. Malta appealed to Europol who got in touch with the Finnish police. Thanks to the existence of Nokia, the Finns are world experts at reading phone data. Using the phone company’s data, they established that at the time the trigger text was sent, the phone was on a boat somewhere near the Siege Bell war memorial in Valletta. There are CCTV cameras by the Siege Bell looking out to sea. On the CCTV cameras, the police saw the Maya. The boat was not moving because George Degiorgio could not steer the boat and listen to his brother on the ‘walkie-talkie’ phone at the same time. And it was important that he hear his brother give the order to send the text message which would kill Daphne.
The ‘walkie-talkie’ phone data for the previous night places George Degiorgio in Bidnija, the hamlet where Daphne lived. At 1.30am, George was at his house but 10 minutes later he was in Bidnija again, along with Alfred Degioergio and Vincent Muscat. So the ‘walkie-talkie’ phone data places all three in Daphne’s hamlet around the time the bomb was planted and the phone to detonate the bomb switched on. This, coupled with the timing of George’s text to his wife later that afternoon, creates a compelling case against the three men.
Meanwhile, back in Valletta harbour after the explosion was triggered, George Degiorgio docked the boat and tossed the burner phones into the water. One of this book’s authors, Carlo Bonini, wrote in La Repubblica that Maltese army divers had found eight such burner phones in the shallows beneath the Siege Bell memorial, suggesting that George had done this before. Officially, George was unemployed but he drove a Corvette and an Audi Q7. He was reportedly known to the Maltese criminal underworld as a hitman. His brother Alfred was also known to the police. Vincent Muscat was a suspect in the failed heist of the HSBC’s Malta headquarters in 2010 which ended in a shootout with the police. He has been charged but not tried in connection with this robbery. His defence lawyer in 2010 was Chris Cardona, now the infamous brothel-creeping minister. In 2014, someone shot Vincent Muscat in the head while he was sitting in his car. He survived, but was blinded in one eye and a bullet fragment left in his head. The m
an who allegedly tried to kill Muscat was later murdered in a shower of bullets. No one was charged, still less convicted for his murder.
All three men insist on their innocence. They have not yet been tried and the authors recognise that they are, of course, presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Daphne had not written about George Degiorgio, Alfred Degiorgio, or Vincent Muscat. It is hard to think that they had any reason to kill her, bar the fact that they had presumably been commissioned to carry out the killing by someone with a lot of money.
Who could that be?
Around the time the bomb went off, one of Daphne’s neighbours was driving up Triq il-Bidnija (triq is Maltese for road or street), heading in the direction of his house. He heard a noise that made him brake. This was, most likely, the detonator firing. He saw a woman inside a car and could see she was in trouble. He did not recognise Daphne. She appeared to be wounded and was panicking. Then there was a second loud explosion, the bomb igniting, followed by a third explosion as the petrol tank blew up. The Peugeot became a ball of fire.
The road goes downhill, kinking to the left, but the burning Peugeot ploughed straight on, propelled by its speed and the force of gravity into a muddy field. The witness was in shock and did not process what was happening until later. All he could say was that when he stepped out of his car he saw body parts scattered across the road. And that he stood guard until the police came, to stop anyone driving over them.
Matthew heard the explosions from inside the house. His mother had just driven away. He ran out barefoot over the unmade road and saw the black smoke rising from the field below. He ran to the car, as close as he could get. He was trying not to think it would be hopeless. He was trying not to think. He just screamed for his mother, refusing to accept she could not hear him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two uniformed policemen rushing up to the car. They carried a pitifully small fire extinguisher, the one they routinely carried in their police car. ‘Do something!’ he screamed at them. They told him there was nothing they could do.
The field was strewn with his mother’s limbs. When the flames started abating, he could see his mother’s torso inside the car on the passenger’s side, between the seat and the door. There was no part of her he could touch to say goodbye. It was an obscene way for a human being to die.
As he looked about him, a neighbour he vaguely recognised stood at the edge of the field holding up his phone to capture the carnage. He pointed out the neighbour to the policemen. Frustrated by their hesitation, he ran up to the man, grabbed the phone and threw it to the ground. ‘You cannot take pictures of my mother in this state,’ he roared.
The neighbour, indignant about the damage to his phone and not quite appreciating the full horror of the situation, punched him in the face. The police held back the neighbour but eventually sent him on his way.
Matthew got on his phone and tried to reach his father. Peter was in chambers at a small law firm in Valletta where he was a partner. The lawyer was with clients and did not pick up. So Matthew called his brother Andrew, who was working at the Foreign Office in Valletta, some 500 metres from his father’s office. Andrew was a diplomat who had spent most of his time working in Maltese embassies abroad but he had inexplicably just been recalled early from his posting in India to sit in a Valletta office doing not very much – a move the family believed was in retaliation for his mother’s journalism. Peter saw Andrew rush in to his office, his face ashen. ‘Matthew says something happened to mum. We have to go.’
During the 15-kilometre journey, Andrew found a story on timesofmalta.com, the website of Malta’s newspaper of record. It broke the news that a car bomb had exploded in Bidnija.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was not the first Maltese person to be killed by car bomb. From the beginning of 2011 to the day before her death in 2017 six cars had been blown up. No one had been arrested, let alone charged, in connection with any of these car bombs. Had the police pulled their finger out, Daphne’s assassination may not have happened. Since coming to power in 2013, prime minister Joseph Muscat had burned his way through four police commissioners and by 2017 was on his fifth. It is hard to see how a police force that loses four bosses in as many years can perform its role. In Malta, it barely functions at all.
By the time Peter and Andrew arrived, the police had already cordoned off the murder scene. The senior officer had been expecting Peter and was watching out for the car to try and spare him the scene. As he walked towards the officer, Peter had only one question. ‘Is she dead?’
The family home was just 300 metres from the crime scene, so there was little refuge from its realities, with police and scene of crime officers collecting evidence and the press cars and cameras. At home, they were joined by Daphne’s elderly parents Michael and Rose Vella, both well into their 70s, and Daphne’s younger sisters Corinne, Mandy, and Helene.
The close-knit family was only missing Paul, Daphne’s youngest son, who was in England and who, on hearing the news, drove straight to a London airport with his fiancée and flew to Malta that evening.
Malta’s criminal justice system is a confusing concoction of laws adapted over time from Roman, Napoleonic, and British law, reflecting the island’s chequered history. Magistrates act as judges of first instance and moonlight as crime scene investigators. ‘Investigation’ is a big word. Their job is to oversee the different stages of the compilation of evidence in serious crimes before they go to trial. The initial process known in Maltese as ‘inkjesta’ and somewhat misleadingly translated as ‘inquiry’ does not lead to a verdict but a series of recommendations to the prosecution. A magistrate can sometimes recommend prosecution against named individuals and even indicate which charges should be brought against whom, but both the police (who lead the criminal prosecution in the first instance) and the attorney general (who heads the prosecution service) are not bound to follow these recommendations.
The initial work of the magistrate during the magisterial inquiry is vital if a prosecution is to be successful. Magistrates – Malta has about 20 – take it in turns to be on call for days at a time and any serious crimes taking place on their watch will fall within their caseload of magisterial inquiries.
There are some aspects of journalism in Malta which are somewhat particular to the fact that, on a small island, everyone knows everyone else. There are some unspoken boundaries few have the courage to overstep, and one of these is the private life of people in authority. Daphne’s reputation as a fearless tiger was not unearned. She had no qualms stepping over these invisible lines and calling out judges and magistrates when their behaviour, even in private, was in conflict with their role as upholders of justice.
It was bitterly ironic then that the magistrate she had singled out for particular scorn and reproof was the woman on duty on the afternoon of her death. Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera’s private life had attracted Daphne’s ire. And although her reporting of the magistrate’s private dalliances may have been unsparing, it was right on the money.
The acrimony between the two spilled into the public domain in 2011, when Daphne wrote a series of posts on her blog.
The fact is this, Consuelo: the law is the law. Being a magistrate, you should know that. But you also know that you shouldn’t be socialising with plaintiffs and defendants in cases you’re hearing, and still you do it. You know that you shouldn’t preside over a criminal case in which the defendant is the brother of the man you’re secretly sleeping with (though not secretly enough), and still you did it. You know that as a magistrate, you shouldn’t have had secret sex (though not secret enough) with a police inspector, and still you did it.
The man she had been sleeping with was Robert Musumeci, a former Nationalist Party (PN) mayor who switched sides and made his career as a senior advisor to Joseph Muscat’s government. The relationship was not so secret. Musumeci also ran an online campaign hash-tagged galiziabarra, Maltese for ‘Galizia Out’. Even after Daphne’s death, Mu
sumeci did not relent and campaigned against protesters seeking truth and justice in Daphne’s case, branding them ‘holier than thou’.
Daphne wrote about Scerri Herrera’s wild parties, her indiscriminate choice of friendships and sex partners, and her closeness to the Labour Party leadership. Daphne’s relentless scrutiny of the magistrate’s private life delayed Consuelo Scerri Herrera’s promotion to a judgeship. When the government first nominated her to be a judge, she was rejected by the judicial appointments committee, who were put under pressure to rethink their decision. Scerri Herrera is now a judge, having been appointed by prime minister Joseph Muscat nine months after Daphne’s death. At her swearing-in, he made it clear that he thought her appointment was long overdue.
Scerri Herrera’s brother was a criminal lawyer and a Labour member of parliament. But that alone did not explain her superiors’ resistance to her rise in the ranks before 2013 when the Nationalist Party was in government and may have been reluctant to promote a known Labour sympathiser. In 2010, three years before Joseph Muscat became prime minister, she had been relieved of the job of deciding libel suits involving politicians because it was thought she could not be relied upon to decide fairly in matters of political bias. And she had also been admonished by the judiciary’s disciplinary body for private behaviour that had brought her public role into disrepute.
So when Daphne’s sons learnt that Scerri Herrera was the magistrate on duty and would be conducting the magisterial inquiry into their mother’s death, they wanted Scerri Herrera off the case. They felt she was the last person who could be trusted to be impartial in Daphne’s case. Peter called Jason Azzopardi, a lawyer who was also the shadow justice minister. Azzopardi asked the magistrate to recuse herself from the inquiry.