The compilation of evidence has begun in the case of the two men who allegedly hijacked a Libyan plane, and it is fascinating. Several witnesses testified yesterday, one of them saying that the passengers on the plane did not know anything about a hijack and thought they had been diverted to Malta because of bad weather. Nobody was fussed, panicked or unwell, he said, and the only one who asked for a doctor was a woman whose baby had a bad cough. Everybody wanted to go home because they were tired but above all, cold (as you would be, in a hangar in 7C).

The biggest piece of news to emerge from the first day of testimony was, in my view, the fact that the pilot and one stewardess were taken in for questioning along with the alleged hijackers, clearly because the police thought they might have been conspiring with them. The stewardess was hauled in because she had taken a selfie with the men who were supposed to be hijacking the plane, and uploaded it to social media – which is how we all got to see it, including the police. According to the police officer who testified in court, her explanation was that she had taken a selfie with them so as to report them when back home in Libya. But how does that make any sense? She knew that the plane had landed in Malta, because she was part of the cabin crew – and she also knew that the two men would be arrested and arraigned in Malta too, so her initiative of reporting them to the Libyan authorities was completely redundant.

You also have to wonder about the evil intentions of ‘hijackers’ who obligingly pose for selfies with the stewardesses they are hijacking and supposedly holding hostage. Clearly, she wasn’t being held hostage at all and wasn’t in the least bit hostile towards them or scared of them. It was her selfie, in fact, and other smiling selfies which the pilot took in the cockpit, where he was meant to be confined in terror and stress by the hijackers, which first got people talking about how fake and weird the situation seemed.

There were no Village-People-style shows (did you notice how camp a couple of them were?) of anti-terrorism police in their black outfits with their helmets and big guns at the Courts of Justice yesterday. The two accused men were smuggled in quietly through the back door to the building in the usual manner. One can only suppose that with the whole island laughing and making memes about their Christmas Day cabaret on Republic Street, those who decide on such matters thought better of repeating the experience.

Yesterday’s hearing also exposed the government’s attempts, largely through the Office of the Prime Minister’s state-paid blogger, at creating yet another fake news story: that the shadow minister for justice, Jason Azzopardi, is defence counsel to one of the two. The Prime Minister’s state-paid blogger even wondered out loud who might be paying him to defend him, given that they penniless. It turned out from the explanation given in court that the defence counsel to the two men are, separately, Joe Ellis and Patrick Valentino, under legal aid (the system used when an accused person can’t afford a lawyer; his lawyer is paid by the state). Valentino is away and asked another lawyer, Julian Farrugia, to stand in for him until he gets back. Farrugia shares an office with Jason Azzopardi who, Farrugia said in court yesterday, has “absolutely nothing to do with any of this”. 

I can’t imagine why the agents of government communication are so exercised by this imaginary conflict of interest, anyway. The government allows the Law Commissioner – a grace-and-favour appointment made in thanks for services rendered to Joseph Muscat and the Labour Party – to carry on with his private practice as criminal defence counsel. This means Malta has had, for the last almost four years, a ludicrous and highly offensive situation in which the Commissioner for Law Reform spends most of his day in the Criminal Court defending drug dealers, thieves, scoundrels, fraudsters, prostitutes and other assorted denizens of the underworld.

And that reminds me – while we were focussed on whether Mrs Konrad Mizzi was actually doing any work for her money, we should have asked the same thing about Franco Debono, but for some reason, no newspaper did. He has been paid a state salary every year since 2013, originally had a state-paid car and chauffeur but gave them up because he preferred to take a monetary allowance for using his own car instead (thereby bulking up his state income), and has done no visible work in return. It’s time questions were asked, because those questions are long overdue.

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