It all began, as readers would know, with a blunder and continued with more.

Flimkien għal Ambjent Aħjar mistook a recent public hearing by the Mepa board to possibly be regarding the basement of Casa Lanfreducci and turned up for the Mepa board meeting.

That meeting was not about that part of the Opera House site, but about the digging being done in Freedom Square and the work to connect that big hole to the railway tunnel formerly known as the Yellow Garage.

Then it turned out that the relevant application regarding the Casa Lanfreducci basement is still being examined by Mepa.

Undaunted, FAA then issued a press release together with pictures in which it reiterated its claim that human bones had been found in the basement. The bones were shown lumped together in pasta boxes.

But this scoop soon turned out to be more of a boomerang, as people started asking some very pertinent questions: where did those photos come from? Who had handed them to FAA? Was FAA acting for someone?

After a rather long silence, the Malta Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which until recently (before the government requisitioned their lease of the house) used the house, formerly called Casa Cassar (from Ġlormu Cassar, Valletta’s master builder) as its base, said the basement was excavated in or before 2008 during what it called a clean-up of the basement.

It said that a report had been forwarded to the Curia and to the Office of the Prime Minister among others.

But then government came back and complained that this was not how things should have been done. To which, one may add, by such a respected body as the Maltese section of the Knights of Malta. This is being reinforced in today’s issue of this paper by comments passed by the Mepa officials during a briefing held on Monday.

Anytime that remains are found, the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage must be notified. The example was mentioned of the findings in the parish priest’s house in Kerċem. The finding must be examined and studied ‘in situ’ so that not just the bones are examined but also the way they are placed together with any other information that may be discovered, and all is meanwhile documented and registered.

That is what the law says and that is how things should be done.

That is what has not been done and any contextualisation has now been irremediably compromised.

Ironically, this also undermines the FAA attempt to claim that the basement is actually the crypt of the Our Lady of Victories church two doors up and that the bones are the remains of the knights who fought in the Great Siege.

Forensic expert Anthony J. Abela Medici made many statements to our sister Sunday paper but since his speciality is forensic medicine and not archaeology, many of them are unsubstantiated and unproved. He says he only examined the bones on the surface and found they were very old. But today science has more scientific ways to date bones – carbon testing.

There are other studies which must be done and which can lead to a conclusion on the Casa Lanfreducci basement – enlarged crypt. The Knights were very meticulous people and any such enlargement would be documented among the Order’s archives at the National Library. Possibly, too, details about the burials can be found among the church archives.

The government has now ordered a thorough investigation of the whole thing. Such things take long to be concluded and they must be thorough and clear. It would seem to be thus prudent for the Piano Project people to forget about using the Casa Lanfreducci basement, whether or not it was part of the church’s crypt or not, as part of the Green Room complex of the Opera House theatre. They must start searching for other options (also considering that the Casa Lanfreducci basement was Plan B and Plan A was to use the still-to-be-excavated site of the BOV building and the Police station).

There have been mistakes on all sides here: the Piano people should not have been allowed to consider the Casa Lanfreducci basement for the Green Room; MASMOM should not have excavated/restored/dug up the bones without doing what anyone should do according to the laws of the land; and FAA should not have been trigger-happy to publish the photos without thinking about the inevitable questions that would be asked.