Eight to one, and still no answer

On 2 September, after a 55-day trial, more than a hundred witnesses and eight hours in the jury room, nine citizens acquitted Yorgen Fenech of complicity in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, and of criminal association. The vote was eight to one on both counts.

Let us be clear about what that means, because a lot of people this month have not been. In law, Yorgen Fenech is not guilty. This column will treat him that way. The Attorney General has appealed, filing a day before the deadline, and three judges of the Court of Criminal Appeal will now decide whether the trial was conducted as the law requires. That is their job. It is not ours, and it is not Facebook’s.

But a verdict answers the question it was asked. This one was asked whether the prosecution had proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that one man was behind the bomb. It was not asked who was.

What we already know

Strip away the theatre and the facts that courts have settled are brutal in their simplicity. Vincent Muscat admitted his part in 2021 and was jailed for fifteen years. Alfred and George Degiorgio were sentenced to forty years each in 2022 for planting and detonating the bomb. Robert Agius and Jamie Vella got life in 2025 for supplying it. Melvin Theuma, the taxi driver who says he brokered the job and paid for it, was given a presidential pardon in 2019 in exchange for his testimony.

So: a bomb was sourced, bought, placed under a car in Bidnija and set off by men who are now in prison. A middleman was paid. Nine years later, the one thing the Republic of Malta has not been able to establish in a courtroom is where the money came from.

Eight jurors said the prosecution had not proved its case. Not one of them said that nobody ordered the bomb.

Two stories, one address

The jury heard two accounts of who wanted Daphne Caruana Galizia dead. The prosecution’s pointed at the accused. The defence’s pointed at Keith Schembri, Joseph Muscat’s chief of staff at the time, who took the stand, denied any involvement, and whom the police say was never a suspect.

An accusation made by a defence team to win an acquittal is not a finding of fact, and we will not repeat it as one. But sit with this for a moment. Of the two stories told in that courtroom about who ordered the killing of the country’s best-known journalist, neither was about a stranger. One was about the head of a major business group and a director of Electrogas, the consortium behind the state’s own power station deal. The other was about the most powerful unelected official in the country. In 2017 both men stood very close to power, and she was writing about both of them.

That is not a conspiracy theory. It is the shape of the case as the State itself presented it and as the defence answered it.

The State already found itself responsible

We should not need reminding, but apparently we do. In July 2021 the public inquiry into the assassination — three judges, appointed by the government — concluded that the State had to shoulder responsibility for her death, because it had created a climate of impunity that reached up to the highest levels of power. It recommended reforms. The Caruana Galizia family said this month that the failures that made her murder possible “remain unaddressed and unreformed.” It is hard to argue with them.

An acquittal does not unmake that finding. If anything it sharpens it. The inquiry told us the institutions failed before the bomb. Whatever the Court of Criminal Appeal decides, a jury has now told us that the case built after it did not convince them.

Three questions that don’t need a jury

1. Is the investigation into who commissioned the murder still open? Not the appeal — the investigation. The Commissioner of Police can answer that in one sentence.
2. Who is working on it, and who do they answer to? The inquiry’s criticisms of how the police handled this case were not subtle.
3. Which of the 2021 inquiry’s recommendations have been implemented in full? A list, published, with dates. Not a press conference.

Malta has a habit of treating the end of a court case as the end of a story: the verdict comes, the file closes, the country exhales and moves on to the next scandal. This file has not closed, and it should not be allowed to. A journalist was blown up for her work. Somebody paid for it. “We couldn’t prove it was him” is not an answer a republic can live with.