Caruana Galizia murder: alleged instigator acquitted

Eight jurors voted against, with only one in favour of the prosecution. Thus, the Maltese tycoon Yorgen Fenech was acquitted at the conclusion of the trial that began on 1 July on charges of conspiracy and complicity in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed on 16 October 2017 by a bomb planted in her car.

After nine years, Malta has five men in prison convicted of having physically organised and carried out the attack, a confessing intermediary who was pardoned for revealing who gave him the order, but no one has been found guilty of having given it. A few minutes after the verdict, Fenech left the court as a free man, surrounded by journalists waiting for him at the entrance. A hint of a smile, a few words, then he got into his car and drove off with one of his lawyers.

A scene that would have been hard to imagine just a few hours earlier, almost seven years after the arrest on 20 November 2019, during which time the prosecution built its case against the tycoon accused of being the mastermind, keeping him in pre-trial detention for over five years and two months before he was granted parole. For 44 days, the prosecution presented the jury with witnesses, wiretaps, messages, telephone records and financial transactions.

Evidence that has led to dozens of other corruption trials and brought further cases to light. At the centre of it all is Melvin Theuma, the intermediary who was granted a pardon in 2019, who identified Fenech as the man who entrusted him with €150,000 to organise the murder. The defence needed far less: simply to open a crack in his account and to get the defendant to speak out, publicly for the first time since his arrest. Fenech took the witness stand and, for four days, pointed the finger directly at Keith Schembri, once his close friend and at the time the all-powerful chief of staff to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.

“He was the real mastermind,” he said, pointing at Schembri, who has always denied any involvement and is not a defendant in the trial. The heir to the Tumas Group, with a passion for secret societies in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates – the man who ‘panicked’ on 22 February 2017 when Daphne published her first post under the name ‘17 Black’. Those who killed her, the Degiorgio brothers, who prepared, armed and detonated the bomb using a mobile phone-activated detonator, has stated that as early as 2015 there was a plot to kill Daphne, initiated by the former finance minister Chris Cardona.