"It's scary that any person can see murdering a woman - a human being - in cold blood as normal." These were the words of Amy Mallia, an activist who is also Daphne Caruana Galizia's niece said.

During a vigil for the assassinated journalist, she spoke about her aunt, how on the day of the assassination, she hoped that there was a mistake in the news, and that her aunt was still alive and well. Her speech was clearly from the heart, and she raised a number of important points.

"Daphne the journalist, Daphne the mother, Daphne the daughter, the sister, the aunt, the friend. We all knew one version or another of Daphne. But I never thought in a million years that I would be seeing the version of her that was reduced to just another statistic - that of assassinated journalists."

As years go by, the tendency to reduce murders to statistics does happen, and we often tend to forget that there are human beings behind the numbers. Not just those who lost their lives, but the fact that there are families whose time with their loved ones were cut short.

Mallia also made another pertinent point.

"Neither did I ever think I would see the version of her who, months and years after her assassination, is still ridiculed or made the butt of sick jokes and disturbing memes by people who should know better."

There are those in Malta who never liked Daphne, who never supported her writings. But one thing is for sure, nobody can have any justifiable reason to celebrate her murder.

Daphne was vilified before her death. Those who targeted her tried to paint her as a 'witch', tried to make her not seem human. After her death, that hatred still festered among some people. Insults hurled at activists who were ensuring that her memorial at the Great Siege monument was kept up, comments on social media or elsewhere like 'she deserved it' or 'she got what was coming' are not only unacceptable, but should also be condemned at every turn.

No matter whether you disagreed with her writings or not, she was a mother, a wife, an aunt, a sister. We must never forget that. She was also a journalist who fought against corruption. Some might not like certain articles she wrote, but there is no excuse for trying to justify her murder.

The fact that she was a journalist also makes the crime so much more grave. It showed that the country reached a point where killing someone who would challenge those in power was considered acceptable. That is, in itself, extremely dangerous.

"Nobody should normalise murder, nor should murder be trivialised. Nobody should remain complacent when a journalist is murdered," Mallia said. And she is right. Justice must be served. We must never forget what happened and we must ensure that this never happens again.