Erin Tanti has been charged with the murder of Lisa Marie Zahra, the 15-year-old girl who was his pupil, and who was found dead at the foot of Dingli cliffs in highly suspicious circumstances. The police had – rather hastily, it is now clear – ruled out foul play. That, together with the fact that the original missing-persons report in the newspapers presented the two as teenagers who had absconded (Tanti’s photograph was years old and did not resemble him at all), set the framework for the way the case was treated by the media and people discussing it on Facebook.

People were conditioned to look at it as a double suicide, when it rapidly became clear that it was anything but. They were so conditioned that most even chose to ignore or overlook the crucial fact that these were not a boyfriend and girlfriend, contemporaries, but a teacher and his minor pupil. And this was despite the fact that the statement issued by Miss Zahra’s father made this fundamental point succinctly. 

I like to think that it was horror at what occurred that has led to the strange reaction of those commenting on the internet and social media in general. That, and the repeated presence of Tanti’s supporters in practically every forum, chastising people for being “cruel”, saying that Miss Zahra was keen on him (the real word and description is ‘in his thrall’, but I don’t suppose they would know either the term or the difference) and saying that the poor man is in the intensive therapy unit at the hospital, because he jumped/fell 40 metres off a cliff. If Erin Tanti had tied a dead cat to a piece of wood shaped like a cross, or shot his dog cleanly so that it died immediately, there would have been a storm of protest. But because his victim was a girl of 15, they are not sure what to think. I find this incredible.

 It was hard to believe that Tanti had jumped off anywhere, let alone a 40-metre cliff, because he was found practically intact, lying on a conveniently large rock in what seemed to me to be a carefully posed position. And if I saw right on the footage taken by the television cameras, he was also clad in his undershorts and some kind of jumper. He was then discharged from the hospital after just three or four days, and reliable reports told me that he only had a slight fracture, compatible with a tumble on sloping ground, say, and certainly not a dramatic fall. Journalists who saw him in the Courts of Justice this morning reported that he walked in as normal – no crutches or assistance or anything like that.

 When he was kept in the intensive care unit, he was under police guard round the clock. That should have told everyone that the police were thinking ‘murder’. They only keep murder suspects and those accused or suspected of extremely serious crimes under police watch in hospital. And yet still his friends protested for sympathy and understanding on Facebook. His sister, who can be forgiven because she is perhaps too young to understand the implications and could have been under shock, wrote publicly that she understands what Miss Zahra’s family are going through because they felt the same way when “we thought we lost Erin”. I wish to believe that she had no idea of the implications and ramifications of saying that when she said it. One assumes that she loves her brother and can’t believe him capable of doing what the police say he did. 

Erin Tanti stands accused not just of murder, but also assisting the girl to commit suicide. This may strike us as contradictory, but it is not. Helping somebody to commit suicide is a crime akin to murder under Maltese law, and because Miss Zahra was a minor (putting him into the legal category of responsible adult), the situation is aggravated. He has also been charged with having sex with her when she was his pupil, which made her at law a vulnerable person in his case besides being a minor. The charge-sheet also includes the information that he had explicit photographs of her, which quite literally makes me sick at the thought that he manipulated a schoolgirl by playing the glamorous older man.

The Zahra family’s lawyer, Gianella Caruana Curran, challenged the court order to keep him at Mount Carmel Psychiatric Hospital, saying that a reason had to be given for keeping him there. Tanti himself protested that he had often sought help, oddly mentioning Appogg. Why Appogg? If he thought he needed a psychiatrist, he should have gone to one, or talked to his parents as a first point of reference. Appogg is not for people like him; it is for those who are marginalized, while Erin Tanti was always in the newspapers, performing or showing off. I really hope he is not going to play the mental illness card as a way of ensuring that he is not held on remand at Corradino Prisons. Perhaps he is worried that there he will get a bit of what he deserves, even before his trial is heard.

I am not one to say these things, and I am definitely not one to say them capriciously, but to my mind justice will not be served unless this cruelly irresponsible man, who ended the life of a girl with so much ahead of her, a bright girl with the future and promise he lacked, a girl whose father has been decimated by sorrow which will dog him to the grave, is jailed for at least 15 years. When you consider that there is somebody only a few years older than he is serving 10 years for growing some cannabis, anything less would be an insult to Miss Zahra’s tragic memory.