Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  Meanwhile, Scerri Herrera had arrived at the scene of the crime and took in the smoking car wreck, the scorched earth, and the Bidnija field and road littered with body parts. She looked up at Daphne’s house nearby, knowing that her family were inside, but did not make any attempt to visit them. There was no communication, no information, and no message of sympathy.

  When the magistrate returned to her chambers in Valletta, she sent for the family, making them travel the 40-minute journey to wait in the corridor of the law courts at her pleasure. In court the family met the last people they wanted to see, Chris Cardona and Keith Schembri. The magistrate had the power to call in potential suspects, and both men had been at the receiving end of Daphne’s piercing pen. Cardona had a grudge to bear over her reporting of the German brothel story and was suing her. Schembri, the prime minister’s chief of staff, was separately suing Daphne for libel over corruption allegations made in the Panama Papers.

  Daphne was no small-time island scribe. She had scooped the Panama Papers by a month in 2016 when she had reported that Schembri owned a secret company in Panama, a tax haven. This was behaviour at odds with Schembri’s position as a politically exposed person (PEP). He denies wrongdoing but it is hard to see why Schembri needed a shell company in Panama controlled by a shell trust in New Zealand other than to hide the proceeds of corruption. Everywhere else in the democratic world, a politician or senior government official accused of owning a shell company in Panama would have been forced to resign. But not in Malta.

  So Magistrate Scerri Herrera (as she was then) brought the family face to face with two of the men she seemed to think might have had reason to want Daphne dead.

  For four hours.

  At 10pm, she sent one of her minions to hand the family a copy of her decision to step down ‘for the sake of appearances’. She could have recused herself instantly. She could have chosen to walk the few metres to the family home and speak to them there. She could have seen them as soon as they arrived in court, sparing them the four-hour wait alongside some suspects. She did not do that.

  Meanwhile, the investigation was delayed until a new magistrate could be appointed, and the scene of the crime had to remain untouched, which meant Daphne’s family had to walk by her exposed remains every time they went to and from the house.

  When Magistrate Anthony Vella was appointed as the inquiring magistrate, he would periodically reassure Peter Caruana Galizia, Daphne’s widower, on the progress of the investigation and ask the family about the events leading up to Daphne’s murder.

  The police were less informative. No family liaison officer was ever appointed, something that could be expected from the police in such a high-profile murder case.

  The head of Malta’s criminal investigation department (CID) at the time was Silvio Valletta. He is married to Justyne Caruana, a minister in Joseph Muscat’s cabinet, well known on the island for an angry speech in which she branded anyone who was not a Labour supporter ‘a snake who does not belong’.

  Silvio Valletta is no Sherlock Holmes. On his watch, the CID did not make a single arrest in connection with a series of car bombs, five fatal, in the six years leading up to Daphne’s murder. Valletta was one of the senior detectives on all these cases and no one has been brought to book.

  The 2016 car bombing of ‘Soapy’ Camilleri is particularly intriguing because he was the estranged business partner of George ‘the Chinaman’ Degiorgio, one of the men accused of carrying out Daphne’s execution. Soapy and the Chinaman had fallen out over €50,000 in a big way. Two days after Daphne’s murder – but long before he was arrested for it – the Chinaman was in court, sued by Soapy’s heirs. If only the previous car bombs had been properly investigated, Daphne’s killers may not have been at large to strike again. Once again, the three men deny murdering Daphne.

  Four days after Daphne’s murder, Silvio Valletta sat next to police commissioner Lawrence ‘Number Five’ Cutajar as they held the first and last press conference on the investigation. Reporters asked a series of questions but the police chief and his top crime-buster claimed they were legally unable to answer any questions which might compromise the magisterial inquiry. What was the point of calling a press conference if no questions about the investigation were going to be answered, asked a brave reporter. Would those people targeted by Caruana Galizia in her writing be questioned? Everyone relevant to the investigation would be spoken to, replied Valletta. That has turned out not to be quite true.

  The grandly-titled ‘crime conference’ conducted four days after the assassination would be the last time the Maltese police made an official statement on the case. All press requests since then have been ignored or dismissed.

  The international press needed answers from the police about the investigation into Daphne’s death. They also needed answers from the Maltese government. Why had she been killed? Who was behind it?

  This was a line of questioning Malta’s government was not prepared to entertain. From the outset, government ministers and spokespeople avoided roving microphones. But journalists were not about to let the matter rest. After all, this was the killing of one of their own, in a European country to boot.

  Joseph Muscat sat down to a live split-screen interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour the day after the murder. He offered thoughts and prayers and promised he would personally ensure not to offer cover to anyone linked to the murder, even if they were in politics. There would be no impunity, he said. That also turned out not to be quite true.

  But the prime minister was not the first to mention the word impunity. Matthew Caruana Galizia had beaten him to it in an eloquent Facebook post earlier that morning. Matthew is very much his mother’s son, a journalist and a member of the team from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) who won a Pulitzer prize for their work on the Panama Papers.

  My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists. But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so. This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist. Which makes her the first person left dead.

  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. 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. ‘Who is in the car?’ they asked me. ‘My mother is in the car. She is dead. She is dead because of your incompetence.’ Yes, incompetence and negligence that resulted in a failure to prevent this from happening.

  I am sorry for being graphic, but this is what war looks like, and you need to know. This was no ordinary murder and it was not tragic. Tragic is someone being run over by a bus. When there is blood and fire all around you, that’s war. We are a people at war against the state and organised crime, which have become indistinguishable.

  A few hours later, while that clown of a Prime Minister was making statements to parliament about a journalist he spent over a decade demonising and harassing, one of the police sergeants who is supposed to be investigating her murder, Ramon Mifsud, posted on Facebook, ‘Everyone gets what they deserve, cow dung! Feeling happy :)’

  Yes, this is where we are: a mafia state where you can now change your gender on your ID card (thank God for that!) but where you will be blown to pieces for exercising your basic freedoms. Only for the people who are supposed to have protected you to instead be celebrating it. How did we get here?

  A culture of impunity has been allowed to flourish by the government in Malta. It is of little comfort for the Prime Minister of this country to say that he will ‘not rest’ until the perpetrators are found, when he heads a government that encouraged that same impunity. First he filled his o
ffice with crooks, then he filled the police with crooks and imbeciles, then he filled the courts with crooks and incompetents. If the institutions were already working, there would be no assassination to investigate – and my brothers and I would still have a mother.

  Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, Chris Cardona, Konrad Mizzi, the Attorney General, and the long list of police commissioners who took no action: you are complicit. You are responsible for this.

  In her interview Christiane Amanpour put the point made by Matthew to the prime minister. Muscat gave her his trademark rictus smile and dismissed it, as gently as he could, as the grief-stricken thoughts of someone who had just lost his mother. He did not address Matthew’s point.

  The interview with CNN was the last he gave for months.

  Three days after the murder he went on a scheduled trip. It was business as usual.

  In January 2015, when the Charlie Hebdo massacre took place in France, Joseph Muscat was one of the heads of government who accepted an invitation from the French president to join him on the streets of Paris in a march of solidarity and defiance, in defence of a world order where speech was free.

  But when a journalist was killed in his own country, Joseph Muscat did not take to the streets to protest against the murder.

  Instead, he flew to Dubai to meet potential passport buyers, wealthy punters tempted by the Henley & Partners package designed by Christian Kälin. The Passport King’s scheme has been described by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a backdoor for money-laundering. It was the subject of one of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s most blistering investigations.

  Muscat appeared to be saying all the right things, expressing his condolences and assuring international journalists that a proper investigation was being pursued. But, at the same time, he did not chide some of his supporters who continued to drum their narrative of hatred, particularly since Daphne was causing their dear leader more political harm in her death than she had when she was still alive.

  When Matthew wrote his Facebook post hours after his mother’s death, he had already had a taste of the vitriol. A serving police officer crowed at Daphne’s murder and describe her as ‘demel’, meaning dung. The implication was that Daphne had got exactly what she deserved. Many expressed their delight at her death openly, mocked her family in mourning, and expressed their sympathy for the ‘real victim’, the prime minister.

  Muscat himself had set the tone when he sat down with Amanpour. After expressing his condolences, he said he had been the person ‘most harshly criticised’ by Daphne Caruana Galizia.

  So the most fluent and effective Maltese journalist in living memory would be cast as an embarrassment and her work as treason, sedition, even witchcraft. Her death became a very partisan matter. And because the groundwork had been laid months and years earlier, people were so conditioned to hate her that there was no pause, no shock at the inhumanity, the brutality, the utterly misplaced schadenfreude. This is what Matthew meant when he described his mother’s death as ‘war’. Only in war are people conditioned to take satisfaction in death.

  Matthew speaks of a decade of harassment and demonisation of his mother led by the prime minister in his party’s media. Before he entered politics, Joseph Muscat was himself a journalist and a television producer for the Labour Party media. He learned the ropes campaigning against Malta’s EU membership in the years leading up to a 2003 EU referendum in which he was the face of the ‘No’ campaign.

  Daphne Caruana Galizia was on the pro-EU side of the debate. She was a true cosmopolitan with a liberal mindset and encouraged her children to study and work away from Malta. She was horrified by the backward, inward-looking isolationism and her detractors took this as an opportunity to cast her as a member of the elite who was out of touch with the people.

  In the context of Malta’s postcolonial culture, the notion of treason, or collaboration with ‘the foreigner’, was a capital charge. And in the context of a misogynistic macho culture in the Mediterranean, the charge of witchcraft was the ultimate insult.

  Many thousands of Malta’s Labour Party supporters could not read English and got their ‘Daphne’ translated and mediated by the party. They did not actually read her words but lapped up the myths started by her detractors which acquired a life of their own. To this day, there are people who believe she once wrote that she hoped the prime minister’s children would die of cancer. She did not.

  What made things worse for Daphne when she was alive was that she believed compromise to be a dirty word. Certainly, she was a career critic of the Labour Party but the Nationalist Party, the other main political party in the Maltese democratic duopoly, was also at the sharp end of her stick many times.

  Her mistrust of the Labour Party is rooted in the excesses of the 1970s and 1980s culminating in its crusade against the Catholic Church and the party’s attempts to close down Catholic schools in the 1980s. Those two decades in Malta were full of political drama.

  The then Labour government nationalised a bank whilst threatening its shareholders, cosied up to Libya’s Mu’ammar Ghaddafi, kept a stranglehold on the economy, and ran the country as a personal fiefdom of the party bigshots.

  In 1984, students of Catholic schools were forced to receive their education secretly in the cellars of private homes while their school gates were locked. The scenes were reminiscent of a latter-day Tudor clampdown.

  Back then, a teenage Daphne, herself an alumna of a Catholic school, joined in the protest marches in her hometown of Sliema which faces Valletta across a harbour.

  In the early 1980s, the government took a dim view of street protests. While Daphne had already left secondary school at 19, she marched in support of her younger sisters and friends. Her presence at the protest led to her arrest. The arresting officer was none other than Anġlu Farrugia, who would go on to change careers a few times, first becoming a lawyer, then a Labour MP, and eventually became the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

  Years later when Anġlu Farrugia made a bid for the leadership of the PL, Daphne wrote:

  I was one of three 19-year-old girls Anġlu Farrugia had arrested on 11 trumped-up charges, including that of assaulting a very large police officer. He had us locked in dark and dirty cells for almost two days. He refused to contact our parents. He refused us access to a lawyer. He threatened me during interrogations. He lied to me. He told me that he had photographs of me attacking police officers and I told him innocently that he must be mistaken because I hadn’t attacked anyone, and the photographs must be of somebody who looks like me.

  He had me dragged out of my cell in the small hours of the night, put in front of me a statement that he had written, and told me to sign it.

  The statement was full of lies, a confession to crimes so absurd that, if I hadn’t been so frightened and worried, I would have laughed out loud in his face. He told me that he would only let me go if I signed it, so I did.

  In those days, you didn’t cite chapter and verse of the law, because one man had already come out of there dead in the boot of a car, and others had been so badly beaten they had to be hospitalised.

  Outside the then dreaded gates of the Floriana lock-up I found my father, who had been there day and night asking for me, ageing 10 years in the process. Somewhere in a cupboard, there is an 11-page judgement handed down by Magistrate David Scicluna, condemning in the harshest terms possible the actions of Anġlu Farrugia and his colleagues, the methods they used to obtain my ‘confession’ (which Inspector Farrugia had invented and written himself) and declaring it invalid and worthless – this after I testified in great detail as to what had happened.

  I mention this case because it is my own, and I can speak about it with absolute certainty as to the facts. There are newspaper cuttings and court documents that record it. There are probably others who underwent similar ordeals, and who are now looking at the posturing of the would-be Labour leader and thinking to themselves ‘Him as leader? Him as prime min
ister? Come off it! How low can this country possibly sink!’

  A man cannot become prime minister when on public record there is a magisterial condemnation of him for the ill-treatment of a 19-year-old girl illegally kept in police custody, and for threatening her into signing a false ‘confession’, full of absurd lies, that he himself had written.

  Forget it, Dr Farrugia, you’re history already. It may be a case of anything goes in today’s Labour Party, but on a nationwide scale, the situation is not quite the same.

  Daphne’s funeral took place two weeks after her death. It took so long because her remains were held as evidence as is routine in any violent death. They were eventually released to her family for burial. The formal identification of her remains was completed in a laboratory. There was nothing left for anyone to recognise.

  The funeral itself was a grim political event in its own right. The president of Malta, Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, was a Labour Party veteran and herself the subject of several critical pieces written by Daphne. Within hours of Daphne’s assassination, Joseph Muscat was using the president as a messenger. Muscat offered a reward of €1m to anyone providing information on the circumstances of the murder ‘if the family would accept that’ and the president tried to persuade Daphne’s sons that this was the sort of gesture from the government they should welcome. Daphne’s family responded that their endorsement either way was irrelevant. The family refused to ‘welcome’ the government’s reward and all mention of it appears to have been quietly dropped. The family also made it clear that they did not wish the president to attend the funeral.