Murder on the Malta Express

by Carlo Bonini

  — Why did you have the number of your girlfriend, your partner, written on your arm George, on your wrist? You knew, you all knew that we were coming, you went prepared, without a mobile phone and you had the number written on your arm. Is that what it means, because it isn’t normal for anyone to write their partner’s cell phone number, the number of his woman, on his arm, isn’t that right? Because the cell phone number is on the mobile itself, right? Was it a coincidence George, that you had the number written on your arm? Or did some birdie come by and tell you?

  — What about the dog? The dog you usually take to the potato shed, what happened to it? Why wasn’t Maya, the dog Maya, tied up in her usual place, George? The place where we always saw her in all the weeks we’ve been watching you?

  — George, we didn’t come there yesterday by chance and you had known for a long time that we were coming. You had figured it out for a while, that you all made mistakes, George, and I think you did [most of all] because you were the one who [made] the most mistakes in this case. Probably, had it not been for your mistakes, it would have been more difficult. Did you know, yesterday, George that we were coming, tell us? Because even the mobile phone il-Koħħu uses ended up in the sea?

  Silence.

  — George, you have the chance here, if you want, to answer or rebut what we are saying. Is there anything with which you disagree, before steps are taken against you over this killing? Is there anything you want to respond to, George, instead of remaining silent?

  — A question I want to ask, before my colleague does, as he may want to ask you something, is the most important question of all, George. Not who commissioned you, will I ask you, because that is a direct question. Why did you kill Daphne Caruana Galizia? George, that is the question we are asking you. What was the reason? Because we know what you did, we know what you and Vince and Fred did …

  — …the call records …we would never finish this if we were to show you all the activity there was. We mentioned what was important. What you did, we know; why you did it, we do not know. Honestly, if we knew, we would tell you, it would not be a problem. What we have, we’ve told you, you can see it with your own eyes, you can check, we have not withheld anything, these are the facts. We’ve told you only facts, but there is one thing we still don’t know. Why, George, did you kill her? What was the problem, that you had to kill a journalist in that manner? A reason surely exists, George and you three all know the reason. You, your brother; and Vince, there is no doubt about it.

  [Inspector Arnaud concluded his questioning and Inspector Zahra went through all the evidence again, from the beginning, painstakingly thorough. He ended on the same question.]

  — (Inspector Zahra) Why Daphne?

  Silence.

  — (Inspector Arnaud resumes) Here ends the interrogation of George Degiorgio, ID number … Present for this interrogation were Inspectors Keith Arnaud and Kurt Zahra.

  — We agree George that remaining silent was your choice? Nobody threatened you or promised you anything. This was your choice of behaviour during the interrogation.

  — Time now is 9.25pm, today 5 December 2017 …

  — (Inspector Zahra) 9.20pm.

  — Agreed. And the time is 21:20 hrs, and the interrogation ends here.

  Three points arise from this interrogation. The first, Maltese, intelligence put the Degiorgio brothers under surveillance in June. They should have been privy to an immense amount of information that would, one would think, have led them to the inescapable conclusion that the brothers were up to no good, that they were spying on Daphne, and that their operation might conceivably lead to her murder. And yet they never joined the dots.

  Malta’s intelligence service reports directly to the prime minister, Joseph Muscat.

  The second point is that there were a series of car bombs in Malta, some fatal, some not, in the years leading up to the one that killed Daphne, yet the police failed to obtain a conviction for any of them.

  The third point is that the police conducting the questioning seemed to suspect that the three had been tipped off that their arrest was imminent, which led them to throw away their phones and keep the dog out of the way, before the armed police arrived.

  Who could that have been?

  We, the authors, are aware that this is a very detailed rendering of the interrogation, but we are satisfied that the salient points have been extensively reported elsewhere.

  And yet we find it astonishing that at the time of writing, 22 months after this interrogation took place, the trial date has not yet been set.

  After the three men, the Degiorgio brothers and Muscat, were arrested for murder, reporters started digging. Who did they drink with? Where did they hang out? Did they know any senior politicians? What about Chris Cardona, the man Daphne had humiliated with Brothelgate? The critical path led to Ferdinand’s Bar in Siġġiewi, a village a few miles southwest of Valletta. Two reporters, one from Radio France and the other from France 2 TV, working for the Daphne Project, struck gold.

  — Is there a politician here who once went to a gentleman’s club?

  — Cardona. He drinks with us here.

  — He comes here? Is he a regular?

  — Yes. He comes on Saturdays and every Sunday. Chris Cardona. And there is the journalist who was killed in Malta, Caruana Galizia. Three persons have been arrested.

  — And these men, they would come here as well?

  — Yes, yes.

  — In this very bar?

  — In the same bar.

  — And they knew the politician, Cardona?

  — Yes.

  — Did you see them together?

  — Yes, yes.

  — Frequently?

  — Together having a drink.

  — Was it before or after the murder?

  — Before, yes.

  A second witness was more precise.

  — It was a November afternoon in 2017. And Cardona had been seen with Alfred Degiorgio. They talked for at least an hour. The cabinet minister looked worried. There must have been at least 20 customers in the bar and, at a certain point, Degiorgio and Cardona went for a stroll before heading home. I later learned from other regulars at the bar that the two men met frequently at Ferdinand’s.

  Cardona told the Daphne Project that he does not recall speaking to any of the three accused:

  Like most seasoned criminal lawyers in Malta, I know who some of the suspects in the case are. The particular pub you mention welcomes patrons from all walks of life, including other politicians. I do not, however, recall having any discussions with any of these individuals, and have definitely never had any meetings with them. Anything else is baseless rumour and speculation.

  Like much else Chris Cardona says, that statement is not quite true. Chris Cardona wasn’t that much of a criminal lawyer. He mostly worked in commercial law but took time out to assist a very limited portfolio of clients in the criminal court. Cardona had been Vincent Muscat’s lawyer when he was charged with – but not convicted for – the failed robbery of the HSBC centre in Malta in 2010. Hard to imagine how a lawyer can properly represent a client without ever having had a conversation with him.

  Co-author Carlo Bonini and other journalists from the Daphne Project reported in October 2018 that Cardona and Alfred Degiorgio had attended a small bachelor’s party in a secluded villa with a swimming pool on 29 June 2017, four months before Caruana Galizia was killed in a car bomb. Cardona told La Repubblica that he couldn’t remember his whereabouts but did not deny the story. To the Maltese media, he said he had better things to do than entertain the curiosity of sensational journalists. In a statement issued by the Department of Information on his behalf, the minister said these smears on his character were highly damaging and false.

  So Cardona gave three versions of the truth:

  I cannot remember.

  I am too busy.

  These are false smears.

  Pick any one.

  Far from never sp
eaking to the accused, he’d represented one and had been seen with another twice, before and after the murder.

  Cardona did tell the Maltese press: ‘The assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia was a horrible crime, possibly the worst of all, but so is character assassination.’

  In April 2018, co-author John Sweeney rocked up at the Henley & Partners event in the City of London. When prime minister Joseph Muscat arrived to hear Malta’s famous tenor, Joseph Calleja do his thing, Sweeney tried to doorstep Muscat. He asked: ‘prime minister, do you stand by your economy minister, Chris Cardona?’

  Sweeney was thumped in the chest by a member of Muscat’s security team for his pains, so one can only assume the answer was yes.

  On 16 October 2017 at 3.30pm, the news broke that Daphne Caruana Galizia had been killed. In Parliament, former PN leader Simon Busuttil and shadow justice minister Jason Azzopardi were sitting on the opposition benches. As they looked up, they saw Chris Cardona looking at his phone. His face was ashen.

  Chris Cardona denies any wrongdoing.

  BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS

  5 June 2017. 7.03pm. Joseph Muscat has just been confirmed prime minister after calling a snap election ‘because of unrest in the country caused by Daphne Caruana Galizia’s lies’. The people have decided.

  Daphne headlines her post: ‘Right and wrong are not a popularity contest.’

  It ran:

  I know – you don’t have to tell me; it’s the reason I do it – that this website has over the last four years become a gathering-post or rallying-point for decent people who feel frightened and threatened at the rise, growth and spread of amorality (not by any means the same thing as immorality). I know why you come here, because lots of you tell me – but I knew it instinctively, even before you did.

  You come here to feel normal in a sea of insanity where the crowd cheers the Commissioner of Police for failing to take action against a corrupt cabinet minister and the prime minister’s chief of staff; where supporters of the party in power celebrate and have their picture taken on the steps of a bank which launders money for Azerbaijan’s ruling elite, because it is linked to the politicians they support; where even educated people who have had all the advantages in life vote a corrupt political party into power for the narrow reason that they’re renting out flats to buyers of Maltese citizenship who never set foot in them.

  The electoral result shocked you (not me, for reasons that I will explain in another post on another day when I have more time) not because you see general elections as football matches in which the prize is unadulterated power for five years for ‘your’ team, but because it makes you feel like the only sane person in the asylum. Now you’re hunting around for other sane people, temporarily blinded to the fact that 45% of the population made the same choice that you did, though 55% did not.

  You want reassurance that it is not you who is in the wrong because you think people who do serious wrong should not be in government. No, you are not wrong because you think the police should act. No, you are not wrong to feel sick when the mob cheers a corrupt police officer. Of course you are not. You are right.

  Four years ago, I wrote a piece calling out the incoming Nationalist Party leader for beginning a speech with ‘30,000 people can’t be wrong’. Of course they can be, I wrote. A million people can be wrong. The rightness or wrongness of a fact, action or opinion is not established by the number of people who believe it, do it, or hold it.

  Of course it is wrong to vote for corruption. Of course it is wrong to vote so as to put corrupt politicians into power. It is very wrong. And to do it for your own personal benefit, rather than simply to ‘back your team’ (which is bad enough), is worse than wrong. Winning and losing are not factors in deciding what is right and what is wrong. Winning and losing are about the power to prevent wrongdoing or the power to perpetrate it.

  You would be surprised that the forces of darkness and corruption think themselves the decent ones, despite their necessarily intimate knowledge of what they themselves do. This self-delusion is a coping mechanism, nothing fancier than that. And part of that coping mechanism is using the media machines and other means at their disposal to go after their critics by portraying them as bad and evil, enemies of the people, who wish to harm the heroes of public largesse.

  Why doesn’t it get you down, somebody asked me the other day. How can you cope with an entire Labour Party machine going at you day and night, assaulting you from all angles? How do you deal with it?

  My answer was what it always is: that the Labour Party, in all its different shapes and forms and under its different leaders, has hounded me irascibly since I was in my 20s. Yes, for a quarter of a century. The extent of it only became visible to the public with the internet. But it was there beforehand.

  I can cope not only because I had the good example of my parents to follow, who had to contend with so much that was terrible in the years 1971 to 1987, and who always did so with dignity, correctly, and without moral compromise, but also because I read widely and know that this is a standard, textbook Fascist method that powerful people use for the public destruction of their critics, particularly when their critics stand alone.

  Others have been there before me, in situations which require far more bravery and moral courage than has been required of me over the years in Malta. Others are there still, in horrendous situations as they are in Baku, Azerbaijan. What I am put through by the plots, conspiracies, and machinations of Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, … their television station and radio, their internet trolls and the rest of them, is as nothing compared to the hellish nightmare that those brave people must endure in their far more dangerous battles.

  The fight against corruption and [against] the decimation of the rule of law must continue. The temptation now will be for people to see no way out of this horrible mess and to leap on the bandwagon with the cry that if you can’t beat them, then you might as well join them. It happened four years ago and has been happening systematically all along, which is why Muscat’s party got the result it did (but more about this, again, when there is time).

  The temptation, too, will be to round on the Nationalist Party and blame it for failing to deliver a victory that was well nigh impossible in the prevailing circumstances. Instead of holding the government to scrutiny as it ploughs on, railroading our already fragile democracy and collapsing institutions, we shall occupy ourselves ripping to shreds the party that was our only hope of deliverance.

  And in doing so, we shall miss the point as we generally do: that it is people who vote for political parties, and not political parties which put themselves into power. Would Muscat’s party have been returned to power in any other European Union member state outside Italy? That is the question we have got to address. And even in Italy corrupt politicians resign, are subjected to due process, or have coins thrown at them by angry crowds.

  The problem that has to be addressed is the widespread and ever-increasing amorality among a sizeable percentage of the Maltese population of Malta (not all of Malta’s population is Maltese; tens of thousands are not). It spans the entire socio-economic spectrum and has nothing at all to do with social class, privilege, or the lack of it. Thirty, forty years ago, this amorality could have been excused on the grounds of illiteracy and ignorance, of Malta’s isolation from the world in a tightly controlled and insular environment.

  Now, there is no such excuse and we have to face the brutal fact of what we are, and examine how it has come about and whether there are any solutions. I happen to think, right now, that there are probably none, because amoral familism, the root cause of it, is the result of centuries of social programming. But it may be possible.

  One thing is certain: you are not going to change amoral familism by pandering to it, or by making its practitioners believe they are right. That simply perpetuates the situation, and the Nationalist Party has been guilty of this too, because the mentality is endemic.

  Nobody can seek to understand Maltese
politics or Maltese society without first understanding amoral familism, which shapes and drives both – and which, it has to be said, has ruined both too.

  […]

  Malta is in a dangerous place, and now we can no longer say that it is corrupt politicians who have brought it to this point, for it can no longer be denied that those corrupt politicians are a reflection of society.

  Daphne wrote her post on what must have been one of the toughest days of her professional life. After her death, the rallying cry in this post would become her legacy: ‘the fight against corruption and [against] the decimation of the rule of law must continue’.

  There is something else I should say before I go: when people taunt you or criticise you for being ‘negative’ or for failing to go with their flow, for not adopting an attitude of benign tolerance to their excesses, bear in mind always that they, and not you, are the ones who are in the wrong.

  What they want most of all is for you to join in the chorus of approval, or at least shut up about it, so that they can feel better about themselves – because despite all that they say, and their cocky attitude, they struggle with their self-respect. They want people to admire them so that they can admire themselves, despite behaviour that is so far away from admirable that it isn’t even on the horizon.

  6 October 2017. 10 days before her assassination, Daphne sits down with Marilynn Clark, a University of Malta researcher working on a project funded by the Council of Europe looking into threats faced by journalists.

  From that interview:

  I think that the biggest problems; in fact, all of the problems I encounter, stem from an exact parallel with what in psychology, and you’ll be no stranger to this, is known as scapegoating. So, it’s when you look at my story, it’s a classic case of scapegoating on a nation-wide scale. When you have the scapegoat, there’s an entity which is doing the scapegoating and encouraging others to scapegoat. And in my case, that became the Labour Party which was in opposition for many years but now has become more dangerous because the Labour Party is actually in government and so has a lot more power. But the greatest difficulties I encounter, come from the fact that they have made me into what in effect is a national scapegoat. And this has gone on for almost 30 years.