When the guilty verdict was announced in the Maksar trial yesterday evening, my thumbs hovered over my phone for a good few minutes.
I wanted to write a brief post to note the significance of this moment in Malta’s history. I also wanted to pay tribute to Daphne’s heroism – as this trial was, after all, held in pursuit of justice for her murder, alongside the murder of lawyer Carmel Chircop.
The motive was explicitly spelled out by the prosecution. In Chircop’s case, it was a debt repayment that was deposited via cold-blooded murder in the early hours of the morning.
In the Caruana Galizia case, the hit was commissioned explicitly because of the stories she published.
The jury found two of the accused – Robert Agius and Jamie Vella – guilty of facilitating Daphne’s murder by supplying the high-powered explosive that was used. Vella and fellow accused George Degiorgio were found guilty of murdering Chircop. The Chircop hit was commissioned by Adrian Agius, brother to Robert Agius.
The evidence was overwhelming. Over 150 testimonies, reams of grim hard evidence that laid out the methodical planning behind both murders, followed by a detailed walk-through of how the complex back channels of the criminal underworld turned on each other when the heat began encircling them.
As I twiddled my thumbs over my phone, making sense of the details of the jury’s guilty verdict, I thought about what feeling best merited capture in this context.
Though I could understand the significance of the development and the relief expressed by Daphne’s family shortly after the verdict was announced, what really captured my attention was that one line from their press statement: “We have heard many people speak during the weeks-long trial, but we will never see or hear Daphne again.”
That’s when I knew what the feeling was.
It took eight years just to find the triggermen and the bomb suppliers guilty of executing the murder.
In the meantime, Daphne’s family, civil society, and the general public had to spend all those years cutting through a miasma of misinformation and outright hatred, sifting through torrents of abusive propaganda to dig out the truth.
Eight years on from Daphne’s brutal assassination, the Labour Party couldn’t even stand the sight of her picture across the street from the court where her murderers were found guilty.
After dithering over my phone for a few more minutes yesterday evening, I decided that it was too early for me to say anything more than what was already said by the Caruana Galizia family. Her loss is indeed irreplaceable, and this is but another singular step in the long road to real justice.
Now that I’ve had some more time to think about it all, I’ll take the liberty of expanding on this sentiment from my perspective, as a journalist who grew up reading her stories and later bore first-hand witness to the rampant corruption that she first exposed.
All I know is that Daphne should have been enjoying her early sixties by now, fussing over her beloved garden, spending time with her loved ones. She deserved to live life to its fullest extent, not spend most of it under siege because she never shirked her duty to hunt down the truth.
She should be curating her magazine, poring over books, listening to Bob Marley, and all the other things she enjoyed when she wasn’t relentlessly unraveling the false pretenses under which the Labour government sold us its now infamous roadmap.
She should be doing all that, but isn’t, because her life was snatched away – not just by the triggermen and the bomb suppliers, but by the power structure that set the wheels in motion for her murder.
Although an improvement in the conditions of the media landscape can never make up for the loss of life that was endured because of corruption, it would certainly be an important part of the process.
And yet, to this day I don’t know one journalist who can tell you with a straight face that things are great under a Labour administration and that there is nothing wrong with how they’ve repeatedly turned the country’s coffers into their own personal piggy bank.
Even those who work for government-friendly outlets will privately admit it to some degree, though they’ll whisper it quietly while looking over their shoulder in case the prime minister pops up out of nowhere screaming FAKE NEWS!
The government obstinately refuses to carry out any meaningful press reform for the simple reason that its own delicate house of cards would fall apart far more quickly than it already is if we had a well-resourced fourth estate. As far as the local press is concerned, the physical form of our ‘estate’ looks more like a disused parking lot with a few raging dumpster fires in it than a thriving plot in the countryside.
We will never hear from Daphne again. But we will certainly be hearing more about who commissioned her murder and why they felt they needed to do it. The government is no less hostile towards everyone who stands in the way of corruption than it was eight years ago when this heinous plot was executed.
While we can definitely take a breather after fighting long enough to push for a much needed development in this story, we must remain steadfast in our pursuit of justice.
Nothing but the whole truth will do.