‘My mother’s hitman said murdering her was just business as usual’
‘My mother’s hitman said murdering her was just business as usual’
A car bomb killed Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia five years ago but her son is still searching for justice
At the time of her death, Daphne was investigating a highly controversial power station deal. One of Malta’s richest businessmen, Yorgen Fenech, was a main shareholder and director of the plant. Fenech was arrested while attempting to flee Malta in his yacht in 2019, and was charged with commissioning three men to carry out the hit on Daphne – a charge he denies. He remains in prison.
Two years earlier, the three men had been arrested and charged with Daphne’s murder.
Earlier this month, one of them confessed to the crime.
In an interview with the Reuters journalist Stephen Grey, George Degiorgio admitted his guilt – and claimed he would also provide testimony to implicate others in the murder. The confession, which appears in
Grey’s hard-hitting six-part podcast Who Killed Daphne?, made headlines globally.
“It was just business,” Degiorgio told Grey in the podcast. “Yeah. Business as usual.” He added that if he had been aware of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s status he would have asked for more money, which was paid in euros. “If I knew, I’d have gone for 10 million, not 150,000.”
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“My mother was labelled a ‘hate blogger’ in official government statements as a way of dehumanising her,” says Matthew. “The Maltese prime minister’s spokesman set up a website in which he tracked my mother’s movements and encouraged members of the public to take photographs of her on the beach or going about her business which he then posted with captions like ‘Oh look, Daphne’s having a pedicure today’.
“It was targeted harassment. She was interested in exposing wrongdoing and corruption and found herself singled out for mockery and humiliation.”
The constant surveillance had a profound effect on his mother, who stopped going to the beach and rarely left the house. Unusually, the morning she was killed, she and her husband briefly went to a village fete – a picture of them embracing was snatched on a smartphone and immediately posted with the words “Daphne enjoying a romantic moment”.
“That post was never taken down, it’s still there,” says Matthew, flatly. “No respect was shown to her, even in death. In the first 48 hours after she was killed the authorities tried to manipulate us as a family for propaganda purposes; the prime minister asked the president to persuade us to appear alongside the government in a show of national unity.
“We had this bizarre scenario where the president kept repeatedly calling my father on his mobile phone and he told her time and again that we wouldn’t do it,” smiles Matthew ruefully. “I remember thinking how insulting it was – why would we show unity with the people who were responsible for this assassination?”
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After Daphne’s death, her family assumed the libel actions against her by the Maltese government would be dropped. They were wrong.
“Instead they were transferred to us, her family, for exactly the same reason. They wanted to exhaust and demoralise us,” says Matthew. “Instead we fought tooth and nail and won the majority of the cases.”
It was only possible because the Amsterdam-based body Free Press Unlimited gave them €40,000 for legal fees.
BBM
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