A Sunny Place for Shady People

Auteur

Ryan Murdock is the author of Vagabond Dreams: Road Wisdom from Central America and editor-at-large (Europe) for Outpost, Canada’s national travel magazine. He shares his love of travel literature through the Personal Landscapes podcast and writes regularly for The Shift, an independent Maltese news portal. He lives in Berlin.

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A personal and critical examination of how a powerful cabal on the Mediterranean island nation of Malta planned an assassination

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I was visiting family in Canada when I got a late-evening text from my wife on October 16, 2017: “They killed Daphne with bomb.”

“Daphne” was Daphne Caruana Galizia, an independent Maltese journalist whose investigations into government corruption had made her a target of the country’s rich and powerful—especially the ruling Labour Party, which saw her as its only real opposition. The last story she had written was about a court appearance by the prime minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, earlier that day. It ended with the words “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.” She published her article, closed her laptop, and stood up to go to the bank, where she’d been cashing checks on her husband’s account because hers was still frozen by the economy minister.

Before leaving her peaceful hilltop home surrounded by gardens in rural Bidnija, she set a plate of tomatoes and mozzarella in front of her son Matthew, a data journalist who had shared a Pulitzer Prize as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that broke the Panama Papers, an expose of the secret world of offshore tax havens. The two were sifting through a database of 11.5 million leaked financial and legal records to figure out why two top government officials opened companies in Panama within days of the Labour Party’s election to power.

She ran out the door, then rushed back in to grab her checkbook. “Okay, I’m really going this time,” she said, smiling at Matthew. The explosion happened minutes after she drove away. She was fifty-three years old.

A neighbor who saw Daphne driving down the hill toward him told police he immediately sensed that something was wrong. “She appeared to be panicking,” he said. “I heard a small bang, like fireworks. Then I heard a piercing scream.”

The first explosion tore off her leg and scattered debris nearby, but she’d only just begun to scream when, seconds later, a larger explosion engulfed her car in a ball of fire.

“I saw parts of her ripped off,” the neighbor said. “Her hand flew off. It was terrible. Then I saw blood . . . I realized they were human parts. I could do nothing. It was so cruel.”

The blast shook the house where Matthew was hunched over his laptop. He ran out the door in a panic and saw a column of black smoke boiling into the sky from somewhere down the hill. His legs were shaking so badly he could barely run. The road was on fire when he reached the scene, where bloody pieces of his mother were scattered across a field.

The car’s horn continued to blare as he ran back and forth, frantic but unable to approach the inferno. He was looking for something to pry open the door when he saw a severed leg on the ground. Two young police officers arrived minutes later. One grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran toward the smoke but then stopped and dropped it on the ground. Matthew tried to take it from him, screaming, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” The officer placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “There’s nothing we can do.” As they stood there watching the car go up in flames, the other policeman began to cry.

Firefighters and Civil Protection Department officials described finding a person inside the burning car and pieces of flesh scattered around the bomb site, including “a leg ripped apart from the thigh.” Civil protection officer Frank Sammut said, “I saw a human hand on the passenger side and a burning figure inside. Nothing could be done.” Firefighters would return two days later to chop down a tree so investigators could search its branches for human remains.

Photos of Daphne’s burned body parts were circulated on WhatsApp and other digital messaging services within hours of her death. They were taken at the crime scene, evidently by police. At around the same time, police sergeant Raymond Mifsud posted a message to his Facebook page that read, “Everyone gets what they deserve, cow dung! Feeling happy :)”

He would eventually be suspended with pay but never dismissed. Loyalists in closed Labour Party Facebook groups, whose membership included senior government officials, celebrated her death with statements like “ma tistax rip ghax saret bicciet lanqas tista titqaleb ahseb u ara carma is a bich [sic]” (“She can’t rest in peace because she’s in pieces, she can’t even be buried, karma is a bitch”).

The killing made headlines around the world as readers with no understanding of Malta tried to make sense of the targeted murder of a journalist in a European Union member state. Prime minister Joseph Muscat appeared on CNN, where he told Christiane Amanpour he would “leave no stone unturned” in finding out who killed the woman he described as his “harshest critic.” He seemed to have difficulty suppressing a smirk as he spoke. His wife was more direct in an exclusive media interview nine months later. “If there is someone who wants Daphne Caruana Galizia to be alive today, that is me,” Michelle Muscat said. “When I heard the news about what happened to her, I think I was more sorry than her own family. Her family could go on to make her a saint; but at the time I said to myself, ‘Now I will have to live with her lies.’ I want her alive.”

The prime minister issued his official statement as the shell of Daphne’s car lay smoldering in a field. “Everyone is aware that Ms. Caruana Galizia was one of my harshest critics, politically and personally, as she was for others, too,” he wrote. “However, I can never use, in any way, this fact to justify, in any possible way, this barbaric act that goes against civilization and all dignity.”

Within days protestors besieged his office at the Auberge de Castille demanding justice for Daphne and an end to the impunity at the heart of his corruption-plagued administration. His response was to fly to Dubai to promote Malta’s controversial citizenship by investment program, known on the island as cash-for-passports.

From 2011 to 2017 I led a secluded life in small villages on the island of Malta. To the casual visitor, Malta is a sleepy place of sun-soaked shorelines and fortified harbors, an island of busy cafés and grilled fish dinners with chilled white wine. And it was—on the surface.

In the beginning I found the cultural clashes of island life comical, as the small hidden assumptions both Maltese and foreigner made about one another revealed misunderstandings that verged on the surreal. Heated emotions gave way to shrugs and laughter as the best laid plans always seemed to go wrong. There was something endearing about the way bodged-together solutions eventually worked out. We lived surrounded by every era of European history in an easygoing place where bureaucratic rules and minor traffic laws could be safely ignored. The kindness of friends outweighed the frustrations of trying to get things done in a society where reliability depended on someone else’s whims.

But this sunny surface concealed dark undercurrents that expressed themse…