Caruana Galizia Family Lawyer Claims Joseph Muscat Knew Of Minister’s Alleged Plot To Murder Journalist
Daphne Caruana Galizia family lawyer and Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi has alleged that former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat had been informed of an alleged plot by former Minister Chris Cardona to murder the journalist six years ago.
“In 2013, the Labour Party considered the tal-lira clock to be a scandal and Cardona had spearheaded a deceptive mudslinging campaign,” Azzopardi wrote on Facebook yesterday. “Back then, Cardona was already rubbing shoulders with certain people and Joseph Muscat knew this full well.”
“Two years later, Cardona prepared a plot to murder Daphne Caruana Galizia. At one particular moment, Joseph Muscat found out. However, Cardona knew a lot of things about Muscat so [Muscat] could never remove him despite his involvement in a thousand scandals.”
“It was no coincidence that Cardona visited Muscat the day after [Muscat] resigned, and the two uploaded a photo together. The photo sent a message to two people.”
Lovin Malta has asked Muscat whether he intends to sue Azzopardi for libel.
This week, Times of Malta reported that convicted murderer Vince Muscat had implicated Cardona in an aborted plot to murder Caruana Galizia back in 2015.
Muscat, who was recently jailed after pleading guilty to the journalist’s murder, was quoted as saying Cardona had approached brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio and eventually settled on a €150,000 murder price-tag. However, no money ever exchanged hands.
Cardona has denounced this allegation as a badly-planned lie and “pure evil fiction”.
This isn’t the first time Cardona’s name has been linked to the murder.
When murder suspect Yorgen Fenech was on police bail in 2017, he received documents from doctor Adrian Vella, which are believed to have contained letters instructing him to pin the murder on Cardona.
Vella has testified under oath that then OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri had given him these documents and that he didn’t look at them before passing them to Fenech.
Then In June 2020, state witness Melvin Theuma claimed Cardona had used a friend to pay one of the hitmen €350,000 and that lawyer David Gatt had warned the Degiorgios’ brother Mario that he would kill them if they pinned the blame for the murder on the minister.
Although he denied it, the allegation prompted Prime Minister Robert Abela to demand his resignation as PL deputy leader.
What do you make of this allegation?
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