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Telegraph | Who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia? Drugs, corruption and organised crime in Malta

HomeMediaTelegraph | Who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia? Drugs, corruption and organised crime...

Colin Freeman • The Telegraph

Since Colonel Gaddafi’s fall in 2011, Libyan smuggling militias have become much more active, sometimes using Malta as a rendezvous point to forge links with Sicilian Mafia gangs. The island has also become a major hub for online casino firms, some of them, it’s claimed, fronts for money laundering.

Anyone who thinks the pen is mightier than the sword may have their faith shaken by visiting the spot where Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered. Malta’s most influential journalist was driving from her home in the village of Bidnija one afternoon last October when a remote-controlled bomb detonated inside her car.

The blast was so powerful that it tossed her vehicle far into a nearby field, where her son Matthew found his mother’s body amid the blazing wreckage. Three months on, a banner demanding ‘justice’ still flutters over piles of withered bouquets left by mourners. ‘Daphne, your pen is mightier than Semtex,’ one tribute says. ‘What you wrote and what you uncovered cannot be blown to bits.’

Galizia’s rented Peugeot hatchback wasn’t the only thing destroyed that day. Also shattered was Malta’s international reputation as a safe, stable outpost of southern Europe, where journalists could operate without fear of intimidation or assassination. It is fair to say that Galizia, 53, had already done much to undermine that reputation through her blog, ‘Running Commentary’.

Likened to a one-woman WikiLeaks, it shone a harsh light into Malta’s shadier corners, painting a very different picture of the country most Britons think of as a picturesque holiday destination. Britain has strong links to Malta – it was a British colony for 150 years – and the island still boasts red pillar boxes. In its capital, Valletta, a museum displays the George Cross the island won for holding off the Nazis in the Second World War. But the Malta that Galizia wrote about had rather less to celebrate.

Over the years, she chronicled what she saw as its alarming moral decline, detailing everything from corruption among Malta’s small, incestuous political elite through to concerns that the tiny island had become one of the world’s most popular havens for dodgy money.

‘People marvel at the way the Maltese economy always seems to be thriving,’ she wrote. ‘Only a fool would think it is all legitimate.’ Last summer, her pen even triggered a snap general election, when she alleged that the wife of Joseph Muscat, Malta’s centre-left Prime Minister, had an off-shore bank account to launder money for the family of Ilham Aliyev, the authoritarian President of Azerbaijan.

‘Whether it was fuel smuggling, drug barons or our shady government, the list of suspects in her murder is endless,’ says fellow Maltese investigative journalist Caroline Muscat (no relation to the Prime Minister). ‘Daphne’s voice was unique, speaking out in a climate where we are facing the collapse of the rule of law.’

At the end of last year, just as fears were growing that Galizia’s killers had disappeared without trace, three men were charged with her murder – brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio, and Vince Muscat (also no relation). But while all three are reported to be members of the local criminal underworld, none had ever appeared in Galizia’s blog, or had obvious cause to bear grudges against her. Police now suspect that if they did carry out the killing – which they deny –they did so for someone else. Who though?

For the island’s 430,000 people – crammed into a space the size of the Isle of Wight – the case has become a compelling, claustrophobic whodunnit, a Scandi-noir political thriller with better weather. Was it the secret arm of the state, keen to silence a critic? A local Mafioso, angry at having his political connections exposed? A hit squad from Azerbaijan, a country notorious for taking revenge on unfriendly journalists? Or a player in a scandal that Galizia hadn’t even published yet, and which now may never be revealed? Prime Minister Muscat enlisted the FBI amid claims that Malta’s small police force was neither experienced nor competent enough to get to the bottom of what happened. But, even after the arrests at the end of last year, Galizia’s family believes the government is not interested in discovering who employed the ‘trigger men’.

From drug barons to our government, the suspects are endless

They suspect that whoever ultimately ordered the killing was connected to Malta’s ruling class, and that suspects ‘in or close to government’ may be being protected.

‘A culture of impunity has been allowed to flourish by the government in Malta,’ says Galizia’s son Matthew, himself an investigative journalist. ‘If the institutions were already working, there would be no assassination to investigate – and my brothers and I would still have a mother.’

At the time of her death, Galizia’s family point out, she had 42 outstanding writs piled up against her in the local law courts, including one from the Prime Minister himself. Nor was their confidence in the inquiry boosted by comments from a Maltese policeman who wrote, ‘Everyone gets what they deserve’ on Facebook within hours of her death.

Indeed, for the thousands who demonstrated after her death, Galizia is already a martyr to the truth. In the words of the makeshift memorial to her in Valletta – set up opposite the law courts’ neoclassical façade – ‘she was killed because she mattered’.

The case has also caused alarm in the upper echelons of the European Union, which is due to celebrate Valletta this year as European City of Culture.

After her death, the European Parliament passed a motion on ‘serious concerns’ about democracy and the rule of law in Malta. Yet to complicate matters further, not every Maltese citizen subscribes to the narrative of Galizia as a slain journalistic icon. The President of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, who attended her funeral in November, said she ‘epitomised everything that is good about that profession’. But critics say she represented much that was bad about it too.

While her blog was witty and perceptive, much was based on hearsay, not facts, her detractors say. She was partisan, disparaging Muscat’s ruling Labour party, but less so the rival centre-right Nationalist Party representing Malta’s ‘old money’ Anglophile elite. She was also prone to delivering vicious personal attacks, not just on the great and not-so-good but on the rank and file, whom she often dismissed as hamalli (Maltese for ‘chav’).

According to Saviour Balzan, editor of Malta Today, if police wanted to question everyone who bore a grudge against Galizia, ‘they would have to arrest thousands of people. Everyone describes her as a journalist, but I wouldn’t even count her as that. She copied and pasted, and was a magnet for gossip, who would publish anything people told her.’

Yet Galizia’s blog did reflect a wider unease that Malta, 60 miles south of Sicily and 200 miles north of Libya, has attracted unsavoury players in recent years. Since 2015 there have been six other car bombings, all unsolved but mostly linked to fuel- smuggling rackets from Libya. Malta has always been a place where Libyans have done a certain amount of dirty work – in 1988, it was where the suitcase that carried the Lockerbie bomb was first introduced into the airline system.

Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his wife Michelle, voting in the June 2017 snap election sparked by Galizia’s accusations

Since Colonel Gaddafi’s fall in 2011, Libyan smuggling militias have become much more active, sometimes using Malta as a rendezvous point to forge links with Sicilian Mafia gangs. The island has also become a major hub for online casino firms, some of them, it’s claimed, fronts for money laundering.

In 2015, six alleged Mafiosi were arrested on suspicion of using such casinos to process £2 billion from cocaine trafficking, amid concerns that Maltese gaming authorities were not monitoring the gambling sector closely enough. Galizia’s most incendiary story, though, was her claim that one of Malta’s many private banks was being used to launder money for the family of President Aliyev of Azerbaijan, who had signed energy deals with Muscat’s government.

She said that Pilatus Bank, a boutique finance house catering for clients needing ‘extreme secrecy’ (according to Galizia’s blog), had a safe containing documents showing that Muscat’s wife, Michelle, owned Egrant, a shell company first identified in the 2016 Panama Papers scandal. Egrant, it was alleged, had been used to receive more than $1 million from a firm owned by Mr Aliyev’s daughter, Leyla.

To illustrate the point, Galizia posted an official photo of Michelle Muscat hosting Leyla at Girgenti Palace, the Prime Minister’s 17th-century official residence. While the bank itself denies that the Muscats were even clients, the blog led to Joseph Muscat being forced to call a snap election last June to shore up confidence in his leadership. As one Maltese journalist put it: ‘That story upped the ante a lot.’

Was it enough to get Galizia killed though? After all, there is no conclusive proof that her story was true. Galizia based it on testimony from a former Russian employee at Pilatus, Maria Efimova, who said she had seen the documents but did not actually provide them.

Efimova’s credibility as a whistleblower is also open to question, as at the time she was charged with stealing from the bank, which she in turn says had failed to pay her wages. She has now also fled the island, claiming to be in fear for her life, making it even less likely that the truth will come out.

Yet, ultimately, the political fallout from the Egrant affair proved limited. June’s election saw Muscat’s party – riding high off strong economic growth – improve its majority. It hardly seems a motive for a murder four months later. Balzan, the newspaper editor, also doubts the Azerbaijanis would have done it.

‘Whatever money they might be putting into Malta is crumbs for them.’ What about fuel smuggling? In October, Sicilian magistrates said they ‘could not rule out’ a link between Galizia’s death and several people arrested over a fuel-smuggling network. Among them was Darren Debono, a former Maltese football player whom Galizia had once warned might become a victim of a car bomb himself because of his ‘business activities’ in Libya.

According to Italian wiretaps, Debono was also heard cursing an ‘asshole’ journalist who had written about fuel smuggling. Debono, however, denies any involvement in her death or in fuel smuggling, while the journalist concerned turned out to be a Wall Street Journal reporter, not Galizia.

‘Daphne wasn’t the person who broke new ground on this subject,’ said one fellow Maltese investigative reporter. ‘Besides, I doubt professional criminals, whose aim is making money, would risk drawing attention to themselves like this.’ So who did do it? Maltese police are not giving interviews, and nor is Galizia’s family, due to security concerns. However, a source close to the family said: ‘The police aren’t telling us anything. All we know is that someone wanted to send out a message, saying: “We can do this.”’

Might it be possible, though, that Galizia died not for exposing wrongdoing in high places, but for some personal attack that went a step too far? Michela Spiteri, another local columnist, points out that in a country as small as Malta, no-holds-barred blogging is a potentially dangerous activity.

‘Daphne was good and I am shocked that she was killed, but Malta is a small place, and people have a Mediterranean temperament, a short fuse. It’s more like Sicily than England: the humiliation element has to be considered,’ she says.

Certainly, reading Galizia’s blog, Malta comes across more like a provincial town than an European Union state. Everyone in public life and business seems to know each other. Many are linked by family or marriage and 75 per cent of the population share the same 100 surnames, notably all those Muscats.

And, as well as exposing conflicts of interest, genuine and otherwise, Galizia also revealed details of who her targets were allegedly having affairs with, which restaurants they’d been seen in, and what clothes they were wearing. To Galizia’s followers, such reporting was a necessary challenge to a culture of tame journalism, in which those who reported on close-knit Malta felt pressured not to confront the malaise in public life.

Yet while some laughed Galizia’s attacks off, columnist Spiteri says that others were driven to the brink of suicide and mental breakdown. One target of Galizia’s ire says he even has to have police protection as a result. Franco Debono, a criminal lawyer and former Nationalist Party backbencher, fell out with both Galizia and his own party over his proposed reforms of Malta’s creaking legal system.

There is no suggestion that Debono had anything to do with Galizia’s death, but in a corner of his office behind the law courts, he has a foot-high pile of printed blogs that Galizia wrote about him. One shows a picture of him as a young schoolboy, captioned by her: ‘When I grow up, I want to be a prick.’ In another she said, ‘He should be taken out and shot.’

Galizia said only a fool would take her comments seriously: Mr Debono finds it hard to see the joke. ‘It is thanks partly to her comments that I still have a policeman outside my house,’ he says. ‘I received death threats, people saying they’d cut off my head.’

Part of the problem, he argues, is Malta’s libel laws, which limit damages to €11,000, which Galizia’s army of supporters would hold whip-rounds to help pay for. ‘There is no protection for reputation here,’ he adds. ‘She made a profession out of that.’

Still, if Galizia’s killer was an ordinary Maltese citizen provoked by a smear, the result would probably have been a stabbing or shooting in the heat of the moment, not a car-bombing bearing the hallmarks of a professional hit. So with no explanation that appears to hold water, what would otherwise seem like conspiracy theories are also gaining traction.

One is based on reports that the CIA and M15 feared that Efimova, the Egrant whistleblower, was part of a Kremlin ‘fake news’ operation to discredit Prime Minister Muscat.

If Russia wanted to sow chaos, killing Galizia was a way to do it
He has been in Moscow’s bad books since 2016, when he refused to let Russian warships refuel in Malta en route to Syria. When Muscat then failed to lose the snap election sparked by the Egrant story, the theory goes, the Kremlin went one step further and had Galizia killed.

‘If you want to sow chaos, then killing the government’s chief critic is a good way of doing it,’ said one Maltese journalist. Ahead of the June poll, Muscat did say he had been warned by Western intelligence agencies to expect retaliation for his decision over the warships. But there was, the government said, no proof linking Efimova to the Kremlin. Critics of the Russia theory also say Mr Putin is much too big a player to worry about who runs little Malta.

On the other hand, Russia has a long history of ‘black ops’ in foreign countries and, in light of claims of Russian interference in the US election, some cannot help speculating that Putin might want to destabilise a government that had crossed him.

Whoever was responsible for her murder, Galizia remains as big a presence in death as she was in life. Weeks after her death, readers were still instinctively clicking on her blog to get her take on any given topic. And, like her investigations, her murder is forcing Malta to take a long, hard look at the country it has become.

Bron: TheTelegraph

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