There is one underlying truth at the basis of most of the stories that attract our attention on a daily basis: life is cheap on our island.

Whether one considers the constant stream of traffic accident victims, or the victims of construction site accidents, or migrants left to die at sea, or victims killed by design as the victims of the Sliema double murder or the victim of a planned assassination like Daphne Caruana Galizia it doesn’t take much to kill a person.

The more we get to know about the background of some of these deaths, the more inconsequential they appear. Yet in each and every case, the killing carries huge consequences with it. In most cases, the consequences are limited to the victim's own life or the victim's own family but there are cases, such as Daphne’s, in which the consequences reverberate on a national basis or even beyond frontiers.

All it takes, in most cases, is an accident, a miscalculation, a lack of observance of the rules of prudence, a lack of thinking and caring for the other person.

In other cases, such as the cases mentioned above, there was the will to kill. Even here, one has to distinguish between the Sliema murders where the killers and the victims were unacquainted with each other and the Daphne murder where the victim does not seem to have acquaintance of the actual killers but there may been some sort of acquaintance or enmity or revenge on the part of those who commissioned, planned and allowed the killing.

If we focus on the Daphne murder we can now see with a certain certitude that some of the theories propounded in the immediate aftermath of the murder were false leaks most probably spread around to obfuscate and spread confusion.

Thus from the evidence heard so far, it does not seem there is a Mafia background to the killing. The details that have come to the public domain speak of a meticulous planning and almost a certainty the murder would not be traced back to the perpetrators or those who commissioned it.

The links that emerged were found, it seems, thanks to the triangulation process brought to our island by foreign experts. This process seems to have been used with profit in  unravelling the Sliema murder.

Prior to Daphne’s killing there had been a spate of murderous car bombs but these took place in criminal environments. After Daphne’s death there were no more car bombs. Does this mean anything?

The current investigation seems to be leading to a rather specific area with links to power generation, the top levels of the Muscat government and energy supplies from one specific country – Azerbaijan.

This is still a hypothesis, let me warn, still awaiting concrete evidence.

Even so, the latest speculation seems to point out that Daphne may have been killed not for any of the millions of words she had written but rather for something she had not written yet.

There are still two avenues of investigation about which national interest is focused:

-         The involvement, if there was, of Joseph Muscat and his immediate entourage, at the planning stage;

-         And the involvement, if there was, of big business at the planning stage.

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