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The mayor said he was summoned to the police depot two days after the protest, placed under arrest and tossed into a cell.

“I will never forget that experience,” he said. “I wasn’t treated badly but I really suffered from hay fever and asthma and they stuck me in this cell with straw mattresses. Then they would come and give you a small sandwich and an egg and shout out for you to go into the yard. Meanwhile, my wife was pregnant with our first baby.”

Although the protestors were hit with a range of charges, none of them were found guilty.

Caruana Galizia, who was only 19 years old at the time, had written about this life experience and about how Speaker Anġlu Farrugia, back then a police inspector, had treated her during the arrest.

“[He] forced a 19-year-old girl to sign a false confession which he himself had written, telling her that if she did not do so, she would be returned to the pitch-black cell, with faeces-smeared walls and a metal bucket for a lavatory, where she had been kept for the past 27 hours,” she wrote.

“The magistrate said in his judgement that it was my word against former inspector Farrugia’s, and so I had not proven beyond doubt the facts of which I wrote. Because of that, he convicted me for criminal defamation and fined me. But how could I have proved the facts? The only witness was Anġlu Farrugia himself.”

Interestingly, although Farrugia had also arrested Pillow, the mayor had nothing but praise for the current Speaker of the House.

“We’re on very good terms. He’s a great man who sidelined politics when he became Speaker and he has a lot of respect towards me.”