It wasn’t long before his arrest that a narrative started spreading in the local and foreign press, linking Debono’s arrest to the murder of Caruana Galizia – who had been assassinated a few days earlier.

Times of Malta and MaltaToday pushed this narrative, as did US journalist Ann Marlowe.

According to yesterday’s Times report, Debono was most aggrieved at MaltaToday’s reports and at one point visited their offices to protest his innocence in the murder.

Debono said he told Balzan that he believed Schembri was pushing this false murder narrative, but the newspaper owner brushed him off and asked him: “Do you think I am going to believe you instead of Keith Schembri?”.

Balzan had already publicly said, in the midst of the 2019 political crisis, that Schembri had laid the groundwork for a press narrative that fuel smugglers were behind the murder and he reiterated this while testifying in the Caruana Galizia public inquiry.

However, the newspaper owner insisted that Debono’s claim to the Times was a “fat lie” and described Debono as a “shady character”.

“He went off into a rant about the fuel smuggling stories and not being the murderer of Daphne Caruana Galizia together with irrelevant stories about his wife and children,” Balzan said.

“He asked me to pass on messages to Joseph Muscat and Keith Schembri and I simply replied that I was no one’s messenger.”

“As was the case in other stories, The Times have a long tradition of hitting out at me. The last episode involved disgraced journalist Ivan Camilleri who was later kicked out of The Times. Then The Times, through their editor Herman Grech, chose to believe Ivan Camilleri and not me.”

“Once again Herman Grech chose to publish a story by Jacob Borg based on the lie told to him by a hardened criminal renowned for his stories and machinations. Ignoring the principle that a story is not a story simply because it plays into the narrative of prejudice, story counts and fiction.”

MaltaToday’s then executive editor Matthew Vella published messages Debono had sent him, which included a photo of Vella with his daughter.

Debono tried to get Vella to sympathise with his situation as a fellow family man, but the editor took the message as a threat and reported it to the police.

MaltaToday journalist Matthew Agius said Debono would often approach him to invite him for a meal on the house and call him “in a panicked state to push his narrative and stop following the money laundering case against his daughter Florinda”.

“Fool that I am, I didn’t file a police report because I felt sorry for him, gave him the benefit of the doubt and wondered what he must have been going through.”

As the media houses pointed fingers at each other, Caruana Galizia family lawyer and former PN MP Jason Azzopardi said Debono’s warning about Schembri’s hidden hand comes with serious implications.

“I was very close to the investigations in the first few hours after Daphne’s assassination, and I know what information the Malta Security Services were pushing to foment a false narrative that oil smuggling was the motive behind the murder,” he said.

“I also know that they had contacted the Italian Secret Services so they could push this same narrative to the Italian press. I know this because I know what the Italian Secret Services told an Italian journalist who was in Malta the day after the murder.”

“I have reason to believe that the Maltese MSS were acting in coordination with Castille. You are now reading what I had found out that day and later on, and which Maltese media had pushed Castille’s narrative as much as possible.”

“However, this isn’t the point for now. I urge you to ask yourselves this question – what interest did Castille have in pushing forward a false narrative right after the murder?”

“If Castille had known from the start that fuel smuggling wasn’t the motive, it’s a sign that it had known the truth of who was truly behind the murder. Do you know what the implications are?”

“Do you remember Keith Schembri testifying in the public inquiry that he never did anything behind the Prime Minister’s back? Now ask yourselves what Joseph Muscat had known in the hours after Daphne’s murder that prompted Castille to lie about others [Debono] and cover up the true killer?”

“By any chance, was this information in Castille’s hands before the murder on 16th October 2017?”

Cover photo: From left: Times of Malta chief editor Herman Grech, former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri, MaltaToday managing editor Saviour Balzan, fuel trader Darren Debono

What implications do you think these stories could have?