On Thursday, the police saw fit to call a press conference – something they don’t even do for murder – to announce that they had found the man who committed the heinous crime of tying cats which were already dead to pieces of wood and displaying them in public places.

They also said – unofficially – that they do not think he killed the cats, that he keeps cats as pets and looks after them well, and that he is likely to have picked up animals that were already dead from the streets as he rode around on his bicycle, because the autopsies (I mean, really, autopsies) showed they died of broken bones.

One of the men, who has just been made deputy commissioner (for the case was deemed so important that a senior officer had to address the press), also saw fit to pass public judgement on the conditions in which the man lives. “The situation in which he lives,” Deputy Commissioner Zammit told the press, “is not normal for the police.” That may well be the case, but it is not for the police to announce that at a press conference, and certainly not when the person in question in under psychiatric care. That is the kind of behaviour that should make us feel very uncomfortable.

I for one do not think it is normal for a man of 40 to live with his parents and 400 caged birds, devoting hours to the latter every day, but the government thinks it is perfectly normal and has given the individual in question a few political appointments.

The next day, Friday, we were shown the truly unsavoury spectacle of a man of 37, who is mentally ill, paraded before the country in a scene reminiscent of China’s Cultural Revolution. He had no lawyer until the courts gave him legal aid, and the press chose to ask no questions about the legality of subjecting a vulnerable man under psychiatric care to detention, arrest and interrogation, without a lawyer, which might not only have exacerbated his condition but left him open to forced confessions and admitting to things he did not do. Meanwhile, the Minister for Social Policy, soon to be President, was banging on in some other corner of the island about how society places a stigma on people with mental health problems.

We have been here before and we do not need to revisit these situations. If this were about rape or murder I could understand the drama and the public harassment of this individual, but this is about a few dead cats – cats which he, going by what the police said themselves, he did not even kill. When I thought that he was the one who killed them, I had a different opinion of the situation. If he was just picking up road-kill, the situation is far different. The man was paraded like a child rapist or gruesome murderer and subjected to the howls, jeers and insults of a mob that had gathered near the courts. How very uncivilised that was – if we are going to gather to lynch a man who handles dead cats, what are we going to do to those who savage other people to death?

The police did not behave this way with the men who actually confessed to murdering, in the most gruesome way possible, the Camilleri father and son and that other associate from Valletta, nor were they greeted at the courts by a jeering mob when they turned up a few days ago to give their gruesome testimony. One of those men described how he burned a body after digging it up in a state of decomposition, and how he kept some bones for “insurance” to collect his fee. Another described how a 20-year-old man was killed by his own mother’s brother and another associate: shot twice, then, when they realised he was still alive, stabbed several times, and when he was bleeding on the ground, they hit him repeatedly with a hard object. The fact that the dead men were criminals does not alter in any way the savagery of those who killed them.

But for whose blood is the Maltese mob baying – for those who do this to other human beings, including their own flesh and blood, or for those who tie dead cats to bits of wood? The latter, of course – because we have entered the developed world in a state of crass ignorance, and think that being contemporary and liberal means placing cats above human life, and regarding those who behave dubiously towards cats as a greater threat to society and more abnormal than those who kill and dispose of human beings in such a savage fashion. This is because, they will tell you, the cats are ‘innocent’. What rubbish – only human beings can be guilty or innocent. Somebody who kills a human being is far worse than somebody who kills a cat. Do we really have to spell this out?

I was shocked by the law reporters’ description of how the mentally ill man, after being subjected to all this, paraded and humiliated before the country by the police and a press which failed to question the police and challenge its methods and motives, sat in the dock “rocking back and forth”, a classic sign of severe mental distress. The magistrate immediately dispatched him to the mental hospital as a resident. He did not need the mental hospital in this way before – he was being seen as a psychiatric outpatient, all facts that we know through the invasion of his privacy by the police, which laid this information out before the media. But he needed residential care at the mental hospital after his treatment at the hands of the police and the media. I am not defending anything he may have done here; I find it necessary to point this out because people seem to have great trouble separating arguments. But it was ghastly, revolting, to see somebody so vulnerable treated so inhumanely, being made a public spectacle of, by the police and the print and broadcast media, over a cat. Except, of course, that there is good reason to believe it wasn’t really over a cat and that the police were under pressure to sort this out because of the baying mob.

I cannot bear to see the vulnerable of whatever kind bullied by those in authority and by mobs of stupid people. It makes me mad with anger. What makes me madder still is seeing people keen to defend ‘innocent’ cats feeling perfectly happy about bullying vulnerable humans to the point of tipping them over the edge. Seeing that man being driven past the television cameras, his hands desperately and miserably clutching at his face, and reading descriptions of how he rocked back and forth in distress in the dock, just made me think how uncivilised we are, and how perverted our sentiments. Do that to somebody who kills his own nephew like a dog (oh sorry, if he had killed a dog like that, there would be demonstrations of solidarity with the dog and baying for the killer’s blood) and to somebody who casually buries murdered people then exhumes them and burns them in oil drums, keeping bones as proof to collect his money. Get your priorities in order.

 

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