The widow and daughter of Albert Brian Rosso, who disappeared in 2005, have filed judicial proceedings to hold the authorities to account for their recent failure to convict two men who had confessed to murdering Rosso.
Rosso, 48, from Marsaxlokk, was believed to be shot dead in his hometown on October 10, 2005, outside a house belonging to Anthony Bugeja, one of the men accused of his murder. Prosecutors said that Rosso’s killing was connected to a dispute over a fishing vessel owned by Rosso and Bugeja and on which Di Bartolo worked.
Mary Rose Rosso and her daughter Desire filed a judicial protest in the First Hall of the Civil Court against the State Advocate, the Attorney General and the Police Commissioner.
They filed it after fishermen Anthony Bugeja, 55, and Piero Di Bartolo, 49, were cleared of the murder during a trial by jury held 18 years after Albert Brian Rosso went missing.
While being questioned by police, the two defendants had both separately confessed to having shot Rosso and to disposing of his body at sea. On a boat, accompanied by a police inspector and a lawyer, they had even shown them the area where the body, weighted down with heavy objects, had been dumped into waters 100 metres deep.
Although the law as it stood at the time did not afford suspects the right to be assisted during interrogation, the incriminating statements they released as a result had to be expunged from the evidence, in view of subsequent legislative changes.
The jury which acquitted the men never laid eyes on these statements, nor could the statements be mentioned during the trial.
It came as little surprise, therefore, 18 years after Rosso vanished, with his body never being recovered, that jurors had found the defendants not guilty of the murder and complicity in it.
The judicial protest filed against the State Advocate and the Commissioner of Police points to the delay in bringing the men to trial, together with other shortcomings in the investigation and handling of court proceedings as having led to the men’s acquittal. These factors, together with the change in the law regarding unassisted interrogations, which was introduced long after the crime took place.
These actions, argued lawyers Stefano Filletti, Eve Borg Costanzi, and Nicole Galea, meant that the State had breached the right to life enshrined in the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. This right, the lawyers argue, not only prohibited the State from taking life and protecting the living, but also imposes a duty on the State to investigate “promptly and with reasonable speed” when a murder takes place.