Daphne Caruana Galizia, Malta‘s best-known investigative journalist, was killed on Monday when a powerful bomb blew up her car, police said.
Caruana Galizia, 53, ran a hugely popular blog in which she relentlessly highlighted cases of alleged corruption, often involving politicians from the Mediterranean island of Malta.
Police said she was killed as she was driving near the village of Bidnija in northern Malta. Video showed the burnt-out wreck of her car lying in a field metres from the road.
Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who faced accusations of wrong-doing by Caruana Galizia earlier this year, denounced her killing, calling it a “barbaric attack on press freedom”.
“I will not rest until I see justice done in this case. Our country deserves justice,” he said in a televised statement, in which he called for national unity.
Malta has a population of 400,000 and is the European Union’s smallest state.
“Everyone knows Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine, both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way,” Muscat said. “The only remedy for anyone who felt slandered was through the courts.”
Muscat called early elections in June seeking a vote of confidence to counter Caruana Galizia’s allegations of corruption. She said documents in a small Malta-based bank showed that Muscat’s wife was the beneficial owner of a company in Panama, and that large sums of money had been moved between the company and bank accounts in Azerbaijan.
Both Muscat and his wife denied the accusation and sued Caruana Galizia for defamation. Muscat easily won reelection.
Recently, Caruana Galizia’s outspoken blog had turned its fire on opposition politicians.
“There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate,” she wrote in the last blog published on her site on Monday morning. In another entry last year, she wrote: “Malta’s public life is afflicted with dangerously unstable men with no principles or scruples.”
Malta Television reported that Caruana Galizia had filed a complaint to the police two weeks ago to say she had received threats. It gave no further information.
5 Comments
Travis Zly
October 17, 2017 at 01:24The noose of oppression is tightening throughout the EU. What is even more worrying than the Maltese government assassination of a whistleblower, is the way that Theresa May and Amber Rudd are criminalising the use of social media. As of today, what you post on social media qualifies as hate speech if it is judged as no more than “hostile” or “unfriendly. UK legislators are putting together laws that will allow you to be jailed for 15 years for such internet “hate-speech”. Amber Rudd has made it clear that those who disseminate or listen to “far-right” propaganda will be as guilty of hate speech as Islamic jihadists. The EU is now converging with Turkey in stifling dissenting voices.
elbmw
October 17, 2017 at 00:11Malta is in a worse grip of corruption than even Cyprus. Allegedly, the Maltese are well known for their frauds and scams and I’m not just talking about a few people in the government but the entire country seems at it. Just google “Malta scams” and see for yourselves. Even the US embassy in Malta and the UKGov websites have warnings about them.
It makes the Cypriots look like amateurs when it comes to fraud.
Mist
October 16, 2017 at 22:11Thank goodness we don’t have ‘ investigative journalists’ here in Cyprus, it would be a battlefield. Respects.
almostbroke
October 16, 2017 at 22:31You took the words out of my mouth ! None in C M for sure , second hand information , reported in the paper by a band of ‘desk jockeys ‘
elbmw
October 16, 2017 at 23:59It still astounds me that when I worked for a global news organisation (not the BBC) some 15 years ago most of the “reporters” sat around watching Ceefax to gather the “news”.
There were very few reporters and even fewer, if any investigative journalists. And that was a global organisation that employed almost 10k persons.