PN general secretary Chris Said today said that Minister Manuel Mallia had lied once again when he claimed that he did not know Paul Sheehan before the police officer was named as the minister's driver.

Dr Said was referring to a report which appeared in in-Nazzjon today, which claimed that Mr Sheehan was the Dr Mallia's canvasser.

Sheehan has been charged with attempted murder of an Englishman following a shooting incident nearly two weeks ago at the Ta-Qroqq tunnels. Shots were fired at the car driven by Stephen Morrison Smith after the lattter's car clipped the side mirror of the minister's car which was parked in Gzira.

It is a known fact that Sheehan lives in the same district that Dr Mallia contested and was elected from, Dr Said continued.

Speaking during a news conference held at the PN headquarters, he said that the Prime Minister Joseph Muscat should remove Dr Mallia from the post of minister on this issue alone.

He said the more time goes by and the more questions made by independent media houses are avoided by the Prime Minister, the more questions arise.

Dr Said asked Dr Mallia to state when he first spoke to Mr Sheehan following the shooting. He said that Dr Muscat went into hysterics when he saw that he has no way out of this issue and started attacking the PN and claiming that the PN launched an attack on the judiciary.

Now we know that it was Kurt Farrugia, the head of communications at the Office of the Prime Minister, who sent the 'cover-up' statement to the media, he said.

Asked by this newsroom if it could have been the case that Mr Farrugia, who normally gives the green light for DOI press releases to be sent to the media, may have been fed the wrong information that night, Dr Said replied that we have a state of fact that the incident came to light as a result of the media which were present at the scene of the incident and not through the DOI press release.

He said that nobody from the government explained what happened after it emerged that it was Mr Farrugia who sent the press release. "So all we know is that he issued the cover-up press release since we have not been given an explanation by Mr Farrugia or anyone else in government on this issue," Dr Said added.

PN MP Jason Azzopardi outlined a number of controversies Dr Mallia was embroiled in and said that during the first weeks of the Labour administration, it was revealed that Dr Mallia did not give a real account of his assets in a declaration he made in Parliament.

Dr Azzopardi said that Dr Mallia keeps saying that the transfers in the police and army were done according to exigencies and are not vindictive, which is a lie. He also referred to the Ombudsman issue as well when Dr Mallia had said that it's not the jurisdiction of the Ombudsman to investigate army promotions.

If the PL is really a government that listens, then it owes an explanation to the public on the shooting incident, Dr Azzopardi said.

"Who emerged with the hit-and-run theory and that the shots were fired in the air," he asked.

Dr Azzopardi said that this incident is surrounded by a pack of lies intended to deceive people.

Dr Said pointed out that former judge Albert Magri, who is leading a board made up of the three former judges appointed to investigate the shooting incident, can never find who was politically responsible and that it is only one person who can do that, and it is none other than the prime minister.

Dr Azzopardi said it is not the PN who is undermining the authorities as Dr Muscat claimed but Dr Muscat, by letting Dr Mallia undermine the Ombudsman's office, as was declared by the Ombudsman himself, the declaration of which appeared in The Malta Independent this week.

Dr Said highlighted that the police have not yet called in PN MP George Pullicino, a month down the line from when Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi embroiled in a mud-slinging campaign against Mr Pullicino to deviate from the issue of the power station delay.

Video above was what Minister Mallia had said about Mr Sheehan the day after the shooting incident.

In reply, the minister said that Mr Sheehan was never part of his pre-election team. The people involved in his door-to-door home visits were all well known people and Mr Sheehan was not one of them.