History Repeating Itself? Daphne Caruana Galizia’s Comments On Karin Grech’s Murder Sound Eerily Prophetic
Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination on 16th October 2017 triggered a six-year battle for justice which still isn’t over… but her words on another shocking murder in Malta now sound eerily prophetic of her family’s own trials and tribulations.
This detail emerged in A Death in Malta, a new book penned by Paul Caruana Galizia about his mother’s murder and its impact on his family and the nation.
Towards the end of the book, Paul recounts one particular episode when he was “sat in court, hearing these odious arguments” made by an ever-complicating court case following Melvin Theuma’s attempted suicide back in 2020. It’s here, Paul wrote, that he ended up “thinking about the column my mother once wrote about Karin Girl, the teenage girl killed by the letter bomb intended for her father in 1977”.
“It is not easy to accept that among the rats who scurry on the peripheries of politics (and who sometimes make it to the inside) there are those who are capable of executing a plan to blow up another human being,” Daphne had written.
But even more eerie is what the assassination journalist wrote of the aftermath of such a heinous act, which in retrospect reads as a painful summary of the aftermath of her own death.
“If the murderers are traced eventually – a really small probability – the parents of Karin Grech may find that they are in for yet more suffering, if that is possible,” she had said. “They will have to sit through a trial in which the accused is let off because of insufficient proof, or is given a jail sentence which does not measure up to the destruction, in ghastly agony, of a 15-year-old girl.”
View this post on Instagram
“I thought of what my mother’s thoughts might be now, and what her last thought was,” Paul Caruana Galizia continued.
“In that moment of inconsolable aloneness, when she pulled up the handbrake, when she realised what had been done to her, what did my mother want us to know?”
On 5th December 2017, Vince Muscat, (55) known as “il-Koħħu”, Alfred Degiorgio, (52) “il-Fulu” and George Degiorgio, (54) ‘iċ-Ċiniż’ were charged with carrying out the murder of Caruana Galizia with a bomb attached to her car. Since then, two magistrates recused themselves from the case due to conflicts of interest, with a public inquiry into the murder being launched almost two years after her assassination, in September 2019. Nearly two years later, in July 2021, the 438-page report of that public inquiry was published, finding the State guilty of creating and sustaining a “culture of impunity” which led to Daphne’s assassination.
In early 2021, Vince Muscat pleaded guilty to the murder, receiving a 15-year sentence after admitted to all the charges he was facing. On 14th October 2022, two days before the five-year anniversary of the murder, the Degiorgio brothers pleaded guilty on the first day of their trial. They were each sentenced to 40 years in jail. Two weeks later, they demanded a retrial, arguing that their newly-appointed lawyers did not have enough time to prepare their defence.
Middleman Melvin Theuma was meanwhile granted a presidential pardon in return for turning over secret recordings which shed a light on the murder plot… which ultimately implicated business magnate Yorgen Fenech. In custody since November 2019, Fenech has not yet had a date set for his trial.
A Death In Malta is published by Cornerstone and has received several positive reviews, including this one in The Guardian by renowned English journalist John Simpson, who described Caruana Galizia’s book as “unforgettable, beautifully written, and deeply honest”.
Have you read A Death in Malta yet?
READ NEXT: Watch: ‘Jake Loved Making People Happy’ - Young Girl Carries On Her Friend’s Rainbow Ward Sweet Shop Legacy
