Corinne Vella, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s sister, says that the President and the Prime Minister are “downplaying” the assassination and “working to transform her into a martyr for their cause”.

Writing on Facebook while protesters were in Valletta to commemorate her sister, Vella said the assassination was “not planned to look like an accident” and “could not have been possible without collusion at some level between crime, money, and politics”.

Investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb last Monday.

This is Vella's full post:

The President and the Prime Minister’s call for Unity is a Sham

Marie Louise Coleiro Preca was nominated for the Presidency of Malta in 2014 by Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Joseph Muscat. She was active in the Labour Party for 40 years, serving as its General Secretary from 1982 to 1991, a period during which criminal elements dominated the Party.

Working in tandem with Muscat's government, the President is acting to downplay Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination and to desensitise Malta's population to its political implications. The assassination of Malta's only investigative journalist, who exposed corruption even at the highest levels of government and state, was not planned to look like an accident. It was deliberately designed to be a spectacular act of impunity and made to happen in broad daylight.

Whether politicians commissioned Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination cannot be excluded. As Jonathan Benton of the UK's National Crime Agency said on BBC Radio 4 on 19 October 2017, "Malta has a serious and growing corruption problem, which penetrates politics. You cannot operate at the level in which hundreds of millions of pounds are being moved around illicitly without the tentacles of corruption reaching into all areas."

Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination could not have been possible without collusion at some level between crime, money, and politics. At very least, it required political complaisance at the highest levels in Malta. The assassination happened in Malta, but it is not just a national problem. Its implications go far beyond Malta's shores.

The President and Prime Minister are downplaying the implications of Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination by calling for 'national unity' and working to transform her into a martyr for their cause. Her writing was effective because it exposed and investigated corruption without fear or favour. To call for unity is to abuse her legacy. There should never be unity with the criminal and the corrupt.

What Malta needs is justice, transparency, and political accountability, and not for calm to replace justified anger and fear. Coleiro Preca's call for national unity can only entrench political complaisance and complicity. Malta needs to break the collusion between crime, money, and politics. It needs political action, justice, and change. This cannot happen under Coleiro Preca and Muscat's watch.