Finance Minister Edward Scicluna has told MEP David Casa that an email or a phone call would have been enough for an obvious mistake to be corrected.

Scicluna was replying to Casa after the latter said he would file a police report after Scicluna endorsed a message on Facebook in which there is a call for Casa to be ‘put to death’.

The minister, according to Casa, “engineered hate speech against me and then endorsed it”.

But Scicluna said that it was a mistake and that one has to be “pathetic or in a state of panic to believe that I want harm to befall anyone”.

An email or a phone call would have been enough for the obvious mistake to be corrected, Scicluna wrote. Scicluna does not mention Casa by name, but he is clearly referring to the incident.

In reply, also on Facebook, Casa said it took the minister almost 6 hours to explain that "your endorsing my hanging was an ‘obvious mistake’. You haven’t even had the decency to remove the threat - it remains plastered on your Facebook page this morning.

"Creating unjustified hatred towards me in an effort to save your own skin was certainly no mistake. And your bizarre, late explanation is either deceit or astounding incompetence," Casa said.