A few years ago, during the previous administration, a police inspector demanded the Magistrates’ Courts to imprison me for two years for sending an email reporting an irregular behaviour of a member of the corps and denouncing what I termed the “mafia” presence in one particular police station. As an academic, I used the word Mafia in an anthropological sense, but one of the inspectors felt aggrieved by my comment and on the instigation of the police officer I had cause to report, decided to institute court proceedings against me obviously with the blessing of the Office of the Advocate of the Republic. I cannot forget the assistance that this particular police inspector received from the Office of the Advocate of the Republic, particularly from Stephen Tonna Lowell who today is being referred to as a leading criminal expert. I was shocked by the manner police inspectors and other officers gave testimony in court. It confirmed one thing that they are indeed experts; experts at twisting the truth and interested in one thing only:  expressing solidarity for one another and nothing else counts.

I still treasure the Appeal formulated by Stephen Tonna Lowell as a Senior Advocate in the Attorney’s General Office.  This criminal expert appealed at the start of the court case after the Police did not agree with the presiding magistrate’s decision.  I am not a lawyer, but even in the darkest age of the Inquisition, appeals could only be lodged after a court sentence had been pronounced and not during proceedings of the case in the first instance.

I still have a copy of the verdict handed down by the then Chief Justice, wherein he lambasted the police inspector, describing it as “inexplicable”.  I still remember that when Tonna Lowell resigned from the Attorney General’s office, the only newspaper to bemoan his loss was L-Orizzont!

As a nation, we should thank Governor Maitland, whom the Maltese nicknamed King Tom and his cronies for landing us in this whole mess, when in 1814, he reformed the Police Force, just two years after it was set up, specifically to make it a tool in the hands of the Governor of the day. Unfortunately, we have not made much progressed from those days. After more than 200 years, the Police Force is still one big mess. What is emerging in the news confirms my comments.. The former ex-Police Commissioner, Peter Paul Zammit is in the news, after a file, which was in his office ended up in Saviour Balzan’s lap. His successor, Ray Zammit is concurrently also in the news together with his two sons, Daniel Zammit and Roderick Zammit.

Reference is being made to an honour killing, which took place in 2008 in Qormi. Daniel Zammit was at the time the Police Inspector who started investigating. The murder case involved the lover of Joe Gaffarena’s married daughter, whose brother Mark, is also in the news. We learn that the house where the murder took place exists no more. Its owner, Gafferena, successfully applied to MEPA, presumably during the Nationalist Administration, and was given a permit to pull it down. This happened when many Nationalists who were applying to open a window or add a room, were going through hell to obtain a permit. To add insult to injury, this same inspector, Daniel Zammit, ended up a partner in a construction firm with the Gaffarenas. Furthermore Ray Zammit, the ex-deputy Commissioner is in the same construction business, as is his other son, also a Police Inspector. Any relationship between a serving police officers and businessmen is incongruous. Where is code of ethics for the Police Force?

Yet the plot thickens here. At the age of 35, Daniel Zammit got boarded out and is starting to receive a police pension, when he is clearly in good health. His request took the record time of four days to be decided. To add insult to injury, after having worked in the Police Fraud Department and was involved in the half-baked investigation of the EneMalta electricity theft, he ended up with a job of 60,000 euros a year with the same EneMalta. I would like to know the names of the honourable professionals who sat on the board to assess Zammit’s application. If this is not Mafia, I do not know what Mafia stands for.

I hope that the Government will not end up finding yet another new job for Daniel Zammit, as it did for his father Ray, after the nasty story involving the former Minister responsible for the Police, Manwel Mallia.  Meanwhile Minister Dr. Konrad Mizzi has terminated, and rightly so, Daniel Zammit’s new job with EneMalta.

Our Police Force has too many dark sides. Under the previous administration, a Maltese citizen, by the name of Nicholas Azzopardi, died at the depot. We used to hear a lot about this case, when Labour was in Opposition. In normal circumstances, if a person dies in police custody, the police commissioner is made to resign. In this case, he did not resign and once election fever was over, the current Government transferred e him to an alternative lucrative and sensitive post!

I would like to remind the readers what Evarist Bartolo once wrote, following Azzopardi’s death that “I firmly believe that an independent audit needs to be carried out on the CCTV footage prepared by court expert Martin Bajada for the inquiries held by Judge Albert Manchè and Magistrate Antonio Vella on the death of Nicholas Azzopardi.” Was an independent audit carried out on Bajada’s work in the past two and half years? The only thing that has happened under the current administration is that the magistrate, to whom Bajada used to graciously serve coffee, has been appointed judge!