A car bomb does not build or order itself, and someone commissioned Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination nine years ago, PEN Malta said a day after Yorgen Fenech was acquitted in the trial by jury related to the killing of the journalist.
The verdict changes nothing about this: whoever gave that order is still walking free. That fact alone is a scandal, PEN said.
"This is not the closure the State promised. It is the latest instance of a pattern: an investigation and prosecution that, at every stage, the State itself controlled, resourced and ultimately failed to see through. The State built its own path to justice and that path has now collapsed. That is a failure of the state's making, not the jury's," the NGO said.
It should not need repeating that Malta's own public inquiry into Daphne's assassination, concluded in 2021, found that the state had to shoulder responsibility for creating an atmosphere of impunity in which such a murder became possible; an atmosphere built over years of institutional capture, political interference in the police and prosecutorial bodies, and the protection of those close to power.
The outcome is what that impunity looks like when it is left to fester. It is the predictable result of a state that has never fully reckoned with its own role in Daphne's murder, and has allowed those the public inquiry named to remain untouched by consequence.
"Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered for doing journalism. Every year that passes without a full, credible accounting of who ordered her killing, and without consequences for the state actors who enabled the conditions for it, is a renewed assault on her memory and on press freedom in Malta. It tells every journalist in this country what happens to those who investigate power here.
"The obligation to remedy this does not end with one jury's verdict on one defendant. It falls on the Maltese state, which controls the police, the Attorney General's office, and the prosecution, to explain how this case was built and why it failed, to pursue with renewed seriousness the question of who ordered this assassination, and to finally act on the findings the public inquiry handed down nearly five years ago. Malta cannot call this case closed while the person or persons who commissioned Daphne's murder remain unidentified and unpunished, and while those the inquiry found responsible for the climate that enabled it continue to hold office, position, or influence.
PEN Malta said it will not treat this verdict as the end of the story. "We owe Daphne, and every journalist working under threat in this country, nothing less."