Malta Responsible For Journalist's Death - Public Inquiry

Malta should take responsibility for the 2017 murder of a journalist, having created "an atmosphere of impunity" that risked her life, a public inquiry concluded, according to Maltese media

Rome, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Jul, 2021 ) :Malta should take responsibility for the 2017 murder of a journalist, having created "an atmosphere of impunity" that risked her life, a public inquiry concluded, according to Maltese media.

The October 2017 car-bomb killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia, who exposed cronyism and sleaze within Malta's political and business elite, sparked international outrage and protests that eventually forced the resignation of former prime minister Joseph Muscat.

A panel of three judges wrote in a 437-page report that although they had not, during their nearly two-year inquiry, found proof of government involvement in the assassination, Muscat and his entire former cabinet should be held collectively responsable.

"The state should shoulder responsibility for the assassination," read the report, as quoted by the English-speaking Malta news media on Thursday.

"It created an atmosphere of impunity, generated from the highest echelons of the administration... the tentacles of which then spread to other institutions, such as the police and regulatory authorities, leading to a collapse in the rule of law", it read, according to the Times of Malta.

That atmosphere, in which the state did not take steps to protect Caruana Galizia, became a "favourable climate" for her assassination, read the report.

The panel found "convincing evidence" that whomever carried out her murder were aware they would be protected by "persons in the highest state positions, which could guarantee them such protection including in the police and in the political field".

Caruana Galizia, 53, has been described as a "one-woman WikiLeaks". The blogger was known for investigating high-level corruption, and contributed to the 2016 Panama papers data leak.

Muscat stepped down in January 2020 following widespread anger and mass protests over his perceived efforts to protect friends and allies from the investigation.

In a lengthy statement on Facebook, Muscat said the swift arrest of the alleged hitmen following Caruana Galizia's murder "disproves any impression of impunity" they may have had.

He added that impunity had existed before his term of office.

"Despite the very serious reservations on the shortcomings of the Inquiry, I accept the said conclusions as I have always done in the past out of respect for the Institutions," he wrote, saying he had "paid the ultimate political price" for shouldering his own responsibilities and those of others.