Europol named the wrong hard drive in one of its forensic reports on data gathered from Yorgen Fenech’s electronic devices.

In today’s sitting against the murder suspect, defence lawyer Charles Mercieca brought it to the court’s attention that the serial number of a hard drive handed to court this week didn’t match up with that mentioned in Europol’s forensic report.

Europol forensic expert Giuseppe Totaro said this was a genuine mistake and magistrate Rachel Montebello allowed him to correct the report with a biro in the courtroom.

However, Mercieca cast doubt on this, suggesting he might have presented the wrong hard drive to court. Totaro insisted that this wasn’t the case and that the hard drive wrongly mentioned contains no data.

He will present the hard drive the next time he testifies, scheduled for 12th January. 

During today’s sitting, Totaro and his colleague Konstantinos Petrou confirmed they were called in to Malta on 20th November, the day Fenech was arrested, and spent three days extracting the data from most of his devices at a room assigned to them by the Malta Security Services.

However, they took Fenech’s phone back to the Hague with them and the information was extracted on 27th October, a day after Totaro received it from his colleague Yulia Toma.

Totaro was unable to tell the court whether any Europol official had worked on Fenech’s phone before Toma handed it to him, stating that such questions should be posed to Toma herself.

Meanwhile, Petrou confirmed he helped the police analyse other electronic exhibits in the Daphne Caruana Galizia assassination case prior to November 2019, but couldn’t remember which these were.

The case against Fenech has now been put off till 12th January, with the murder suspect’s legal team set to request new witnesses from the Attorney General, who will have a month to deliberate.

What do you make of this development?