This Is What Facebook Tells Us About The Young Maltese Soldiers Charged With Killing A Migrant
As Malta comes to grips with its first confirmed racially motivated killing, focus will now inevitably turn on the two young soldiers behind this brutal act. What circumstances in the lives of these young men, aged 21 and 22, could have led to them murdering a complete stranger in cold blood?
Details will no doubt emerge in court but an analysis of their Facebook profiles could help form a profile of Francesco Fenech and Lorin Scicluna, at least in terms of what they wanted people to know about them.
They are friends
As has already been reported, the two suspects were clearly friends with each other, regularly liking each other’s photos and bantering with each other.
Both, but particularly Lorin, had an interest in guns
Francesco Fenech allegedly used a gun to kill Lassana Cisse Souleymane and injure Ibrahim Bah and Mohammed Diallo, but according to Facebook, it was Lorin who had more of a fondness for that choice of weapon.
From Scicluna’s page
From Fenech’s page
Both were proud of being soldiers
Both Scicluna and Fenech had only recently joined the AFM but it is clear from their Facebook pages that they were proud of their jobs and were already identifying themselves as soldiers. Fenech had published a number of photos of himself in uniform and used one of them as his cover photo, and both suspects had followed several local and international Facebook pages for military communities.
Scicluna is into kickboxing
Lorin Scicluna clearly enjoyed kickboxing and appeared to form part of one of Malta’s kickboxing clubs
Both clearly appear to support the Labour Party
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has linked the murder to anti-migrant rhetoric spouted by the likes of Imperium Europa, but the two soldiers ironically appear to support the Labour Party.
From Fenech’s wall
From Scicluna’s wall
But Scicluna also followed anti-migration pages
However, Scicluna also followed Maltese anti-migration pages called ‘Defend Malta’ and ‘Ir-Reati Kollha tal-Barranin f’Malta’ and a page of a Moviment Patrijotti Maltin candidate. He also followed a page about the history of the Wehrmacht but his sympathy for the Nazis appears to have stopped there.
Fenech followed several black personalities
Fenech appears to be quite the football fan, following not only pages related to his favourite team (AC Milan) but also the pages of several footballers from various clubs. The race of the footballers didn’t appear to have a part to play in his assessment of them, with the likes of Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku and Alexandre Lacazette among those he followed.
He also followed several other black personalities, such as the sprinter Usain Bolt, the actors Eddie Murphy and Morgan Freeman and the rappers Snoop Dogg and Sean Kingston.
Scicluna’s friend died in a high-profile accident last year
Scicluna appears to have been good friends with a young man who died in a high-profile accident last year. Scicluna’s Facebook cover photo, which shows the two of them together, is captioned with “Till we meet again”, was uploaded on the day his friend died and hasn’t been updated since.
Both had very regular interests
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of their pages is just how regular their interests appeared to be. Both were fans of cars and car racing and both followed popular local and international jokey pages.
Scicluna followed travel pages, the Maltese bonsai club and The Notorious B.I.G., while Fenech followed several popular TV shows such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the Big Bang Theory, and liked several well-known musicians and bands, from My Chemical Romance and Lana del Rey to 50 Cent and Linkin Park.
And yet the two young men have now been charged with the racially motivated murder of a man and the attempted murder of two others. If their Facebook feeds are anything to go by, this is another clear example of how killers are not the clear-cut villains you see on the screen and of how they can fit seamlessly into people’s everyday lives.
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