Police efforts in tracking down those involved in the trafficking and murder of Chinese people between Malta and Sicily have yielded results, and this has been the best news this week. The individuals are Maltese, which is no surprise, despite the wishful thinking of those who mentioned the Chinese Mafia.

It was quite obvious from the many clues, that what we are dealing with here is a straightforward matter of Maltese thuggery and nothing more sophisticated, which made us notorious after the Second World War, causing many decent Maltese immigrants to “disappear” into Britain because of the shameful connotations of owning up to their nationality.

All we can do now is hope that they do not get off lightly and that they are not paraded as victims against whom there is no proof.

All this is the ugly side of Malta, shoved into our faces because the place is so small. The police, so often criticised, certainly deserve our praise for this one.

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How cruel do you have to be to stove in a woman’s skull and throw her into the icy sea, miles and miles from the nearest shore, just because she was begging and pleading that she could not swim? What manner of monsters are these? I shudder to think I might be bumping into them at the supermarket or in the street.

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I think we can safely assume (you cannot jump to conclusions in the courtroom, but fortunately, you can do so everywhere else) that the trips we found out about, because of the evidence in the way of floating corpses and people bobbing around in lifebuoys, were far from being the only ones.

There will have been many “ferry across the River Styx” journeys that will never be known to us, because the corpses were never washed up, and no mercantile vessel came across anything out of the ordinary.

Everything indicates that this is a considerable operation, and that it is as well-organised as something can be when it happens on the wrong side of the law and involves murder and trafficking of human beings.

The police have seized massive power-boats, one of them reputedly built to order and with special specifications. It certainly was not being used for posing round the Blue Lagoon for three months in the summer. Or maybe it was – by a pater familias who takes the wife or girlfriend and a posse of kids out on Sundays, and then murderously ferries Chinese to a point 15 miles off Sicily during the rest of the week.

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An autopsy performed on the corpse of a young Chinese woman washed up in Gozo indicates that she died after the murders of other Chinese on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday.

This means that the cold-hearted so-and-sos felt so confident of not being caught that they went right ahead with another trip, as scheduled.

The publicity given to the deaths of those other people did not even serve to shock their sensibilities and make them reflect on the seriousness of their crimes. Oh, no – of course not.

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Chinese people have parents, too, though we choose to forget this. Only Maltese mothers suffer. Only Maltese fathers mourn. We take ethnocentricity to fresh lows.

Chinese parents go against the odds to raise the money to get their sons and daughters out of China and into Europe.

Malta just happens to be the latest entry-point as other European states have made their visa procedures water-tight, because they have already experienced so many problems with Chinese tourists who vanish off the radar. These parents sometimes sell everything they own, go into huge debts that cripples them and work for years to finance their precious only child’s journey to the west.

We forget that, too – Chinese children are only children, putting a far more tragic perspective on the parents’ loss. It is not easy to find a relatively vast sum of money and then to use it to send your only child out into the world, in the hope that he or she will have a better life in Europe.

The bodies picked up between Malta and Sicily were of men and women in their 20s, and their parents are almost certainly alive and wondering what has become of them.

There is no way they will ever know for certain, because we do not know the names of the dead, nor where they came from. Their parents cannot be given the tragic news. For the rest of their lives they will wonder what happened. To a parent, this is actually worse than knowing the terrible truth.

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We tend to forget that all this began with the confident news, a couple of years ago, that China was going to be the new market for our English language schools.

It was trumpeted as a success that hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese were looking to Malta as the perfect place to study English.

It always seemed weird to me. The balance of facts just was not right.

Why would people who are not affluent journey halfway round the world at great expense, to spend three weeks at an “English as a foreign language” school, on a tiny island in the Mediterranean?

It would be cheaper and more efficient to employ a private tutor in China.

Yes, many of them would have come here for genuine reasons, but the visa records apparently show that large numbers of those who came into Malta disappeared.

Contrary to many who suspect the Maltese embassy in Beijing of corruption in the issuing of visas, I think that the truth lies rather in naïve enthusiasm.

I do not know any of the individuals mentioned, but it seems more like a case of overzealousness in ‘feeding’ Malta with Chinese students so that there would be more good news for the government to shout about (“Look at all the Chinese coming to Malta! That’s the business!”).

Instead, we have maximum embarrassment and murder on our hands just because nobody thought to track these people, making sure they leave Malta legally, which is our responsibility to do.

Also, it is extraordinary that nobody stopped to wonder why the Chinese were coming here in droves, as though Malta is the world centre of education. Come on – it is so obvious that there was something that did not fit.

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We like to criticise the Italians for being disorganised and chaotic, but after the Pope’s funeral, we have to take it all back.

To cope with that mammoth event at such short notice and to have it all run so smoothly, they must have had a cupboard of plans A to Z, ready and waiting to go. It was stupendous.