Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb outside her home (Picture: AP)
The Panama Papers journalist killed by
a bomb in her car signed off her last blog post with a
warning which seems chilling in hindsight. On the day she was killed, Daphne Caruana
Galizia, 53, wrote:
‘There are crooks everywhere you look
now. The situation is desperate.’
The fearless blogger died less than an hour later when a
powerful explosive detonated in her Peugeot 108 on
Monday afternoon. It blew her car into several pieces, and debris was found in a nearby
field. Two weeks before she died, she told police she had
received threats.
‘Now what was many times foretold, threatened, wished for by people who
despised her has finally happened,’ an editorial in The
Malta Independent, a daily newspaper for which Caruana Galizia wrote twice weekly, said.
Her investigations into corruption
and Malta’s dark underbelly saw her lead the investigation into her country for the Panama
Papers leak into offshore bank accounts last April, and
recently earned her the accolade of ‘one-woman Wikileaks’. She took aim at the political
establishment in Malta, which she believed had become a
‘mafia state’ rife with corruption, as the Guardian put it. There were street protests after the
Panama Papers leak, with a general election called in
Malta over the scandal. Maltese Chief of Staff Keith Schembri, named in Galizia’s last blog
post, was accused by opposition politician Simon
Busuttil of being linked to a scheme accepting kickbacks from wealthy Russians willing to
pay for Maltese passports for the access to the EU they
offered. Schembri has
denied any wrongdoing and implied his offshore account links were related to legitimate
business dealings before going into politics. In a libel case
about the allegations reported by the Maltese Independent, he said he never took
kickbacks
and ‘testified that while he left positions he held to
become Chief of Staff, it did not mean he gave up his shareholdings.’ Galizia was a fearless
reporter who took on injustice wherever she perceived
it and there are fears that the bomb in her car was arranged by someone who feared what
she could expose. The Maltese Independent reports
there have been 15 ‘Mafia-style’ assassinations in Malta in the last 10 years, including
several other car bombs. There is no indication yet who
could have been responsible for Galizia’s death, but she made many enemies in the course
of her career, with her political reporting just one
example of how she was willing to take on powerful interests.
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