Several thousand Maltese citizens on Sunday rallied to honor investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia’s, who was on Monday last week killed by a car bomb, but the prime minister and opposition leader who were chief targets of Caruana Galizia’s reporting did not attend.
Participants at the rally in Malta’s capital, Valletta, placed flowers at a memorial to the journalist that sprang up opposite the law court building after her murder.
Some wore T-shirts or carried placards emblazoned with words from Caruana Galizia’s final blog post: “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”
Photo: Reuters
Police removed a banner describing Malta as a “mafia state.” Hundreds of participants later held a sit-in outside police headquarters, demanding the resignation of Malta’s police commissioner. Some hurled tomatoes, cakes and coins against an enlarged photograph of the commissioner spread out on the street.
The homicide of the journalist, who devoted her career to exposing wrongdoing in Malta and raised her three sons there, united many of the nation’s oft-squabbling politicians, at least for a day.
Caruana Galizia had repeatedly criticized police and judicial officials.
Malta’s two dominant political forces, the ruling Labor and opposition Nationalist parties, participated in the rally, which was organized to press demands for justice in her slaying.
However, Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat a few hours before the event told his Labor party’s radio station that he would not attend, because he knew the anti-corruption reporter’s family did not want him to be there.
”I know where I should be and where I should not be. I am not a hypocrite and I recognize the signs,” Muscat said, adding that he supported the rally’s goals of calling for justice and national unity.
Nationalist leader Adrian Delia also skipped the rally, saying he did not want to “stir controversy.”
”Today is not about me, but about the rule of law and democracy,” Delia told reporters.
Muscat and Delia, while fierce political rivals, have another thing in common: Both brought libel lawsuits against Caruana Galizia. Delia withdrew his pending libel cases last week after her killing.
Caruana Galizia’s family has refused to endorse the government’s offer of a 1 million euro (US$1.18 million) reward and full protection to anyone with information that leads to the arrest and prosecution of her killer or killers.
Instead, the family, which includes a son who is an investigative journalist himself, has demanded that Muscat resign.
In their quest for a serious and efficient investigation, Caruana Galizia’s husband and children also want Malta’s top police office and attorney general replaced.
“The killers decided to silence her, but they won’t silence her spirit, they won’t silence us,” said Christophe Deloire, a French journalist from the journalism advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders. “From us they will not have more than one minute of silence.”
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