The Maltese Factor: Daphne Caruana Galizia's Murder Opened Deadly Door

First there was Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta in October, 2017.

Four months later, in February 2018 it was Jan Kuciak in Slovakia.

In April this year it was Giorgos Karaivaz in Greece.

In July this year it was Peter R. de Vries in The Netherlands.

All murdered, they were tied together by what they did: investigative journalists looking into corruption – Galizia in business and politics; Kuciak investigating tax fraud involving businessmen tied to politicians; Karaivaz a relentless hunter for wrongdoing in the police and organized crime, where he had ties to both; de Vries a famous crime reporter, counseling a witness in a case involving a Dutch-Moroccan gang.

Galizia was killed with a car bomb. Kuciak – along with his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová – gunned down in their apartment.

Karaivaz was shot some 17 times as he parked outside his home, the gunman getting off the back of a motorcycle driven by an accomplice, a final shot to the head. De Vries was shot in the head in Amsterdam before a crowd, lasting nine days in a hospital before succumbing to his injuries.

In none of the cases has the person behind ordering the killings been convicted, a man in Malta given 15 years for planting the bomb; a businessman in Slovakia acquitted of being the mastermind in the Kuciak murder; Greek authorities said to believe Karaivaz's killers were imported from another country and fled; Dutch police holding two suspects in de Vries killing, believed a contract hit.

Caruana Galizia's sister Corinne Vella said she has attended all the court hearings into the case, dragging on almost four years after the journalist was probing corruption all the way up to the office of then-Premier Joseph Muscat, who resigned three months after her death.

“When she was killed there was worry that that someone else was going to get killed and three months Jan Kuciak was killed,” she told Blueprint for Free Speech, believing – as an independent inquiry of former judges in Malta found – that politicians and criminals there think they are above the law, an attitude which led to her murder.

“When I want to see is justice done. I want justice for Daphne. Malta has failed Daphne and now it can show justice,” she said. “I don't want revenge.”

She said this “underscores something that press freedom groups have said all along … the culture of impunity … that her case is emblematic and it affects what happens in other cases in Europe.”

The inquiry into Caruana Galizia's murder found the Maltese state “has to bear responsibility” for the assassination because those in power thought they could get away with it – and still have so far.

The report said the state failed to recognize the real risk to Caruana Galizia’s life, given the threats she had lived under, and didn't protect her.

Her family said the findings showed “that her assassination was a direct result of the collapse of the rule of law and the impunity that the state provided to the corrupt network she was reporting on.”

SIX, TWO AND EVEN

After Galizia’s murder, the European Union's then-Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova pushed Maltese officials to speed a probe, which didn't happen.

Commission Vice-President Frans Timmerman said then that the investigation “is not just about bringing to justice the people who have actually made the bomb, and made the explosion that killed Daphne. This is also about uncovering who gave the order to do that.” But it hasn't yet.

That was in April, 2018.

Now, 3 1/3 years later, after authorities squeezed by the EU and international journalist groups gathered evidence and witness testimony, an indictment on charges of complicity in the murder and for criminal conspiracy was filed against Yorgen Fenech, a hotelier, who denied any involvement in the murder.

Three men were charged with carrying out her murder, one of whom has pleaded guilty. An alleged middleman was given a Presidential pardon to spill what he knew. Two more people were charged with supplying the bomb.

Fenech, one of Malta's wealthiest businessman, was involved in a consortium which won a contract with the Maltese government to build a power station and and led a business empire including property, imports and a car dealership.

The wait will go on as no date for his trial has been set although Vella said she's satisfied that the relentless pressure from Caruana Galizia's family, media groups and the EU pushed Malta into a corner to finally do something.

“The reason the public inquiry came about is because there was a sustained campaign to make it happen,” she said. “If impunity persists then other people are going to be killed .... crime fighting systems don't match the speed and precision of the criminals themselves,” she added.

Journalists keep being killed around the world – 50 in 2020 said Reporters Without Borders while the International Federation of Journalists said it was 66 – but it's the name of Daphne Caruana Galizia that resonates.

She has become a symbol of what the profession is about, and how dangerous it is now with authoritarian governments targeting reporters, governments trying to rein them in with legislation, and gangsters no longer afraid to target them.

Attila Mong, a Hungarian journalist who is The Committee to Protect Journalists Europe Correspondent in Berlin told Blueprint that the group “has been consistent in saying that Maltese authorities should take all measures to ensure that all the perpetrators of this crime, including its masterminds, are brought to justice and that Malta … must finally end impunity in her murder.”

He noted that seven months after Caruana Galizia's murder that CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney told the Helsinki Commission that, “It was urgent to address the issue in the European Union, where attacks on the press have been relatively few over the years, but where the environment is changing."

Civil society NGO Repubblika in August held a vigil in front of the Valletta Law Courts in Malta's capital to show her supporters aren't going away and will keep following the case.

Repubblika President-elect Alessandra Dee Crespo said the current government of Prime Minister Robert Abela, who apologized to her family over state failures, had argued against the inquiry by a panel of judges.

“The people at the top have changed, but the situation remains the same, or so it seems, “she said.