As if the verdict that acquitted businessman Yorgen Fenech of complicity and conspiracy to commit a crime in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia was already not shocking enough, Friday saw a government minister seemingly suggest that Caruana Galizia was not necessarily killed due to her work as a journalist.

Culture Minister Malcolm Paul Agius Galea on Friday would not say when questioned by journalists whether he felt that Caruana Galizia had been murdered due to her work as a journalist.

The implication came after Agius Galea, who is the minister responsible for the media sector, brushed off the notion that journalists should feel any less safe after Wednesday's verdict.

"That's what you are saying," the minister said when the journalist asking him the question said that Caruana Galizia had been killed due to her work. "In truth these are things where we need to be careful," he said.

"If a friend of mine, a doctor, is killed and they say he was killed because he is a doctor, I wouldn't now exactly what happened. I equally don't know what happened. In truth, we need to be careful,"he said.

Asked outright whether he was saying that

Caruana Galizia was not killed because of her work, the minister said that "at this point in time that's why it's important to be cautious. It's clear that things are not concluded yet."

These are remarks which run directly counter to any form of intuition and to any and every fact that has been established over the course of the investigations into Daphne Caruana Galizia's murder.

It is beyond comprehensible and even conceivable that the government minister who is responsible for the media sector in Malta would even hold the thought that Daphne's murder via a car bombing was to do with anything other than her work.

This is the man whom we as the journalistic community must trust to spearhead reforms to strengthen our sector and to, more so, offer us the necessary protection and safeguards to be able to do our jobs in the safest of manners.

If the Minister does not think that Daphne was murdered due to her journalistic work, then why exactly was she killed? Why did hundreds of thousands of euros change hands so that she can be blown up in the most grizzly and brutal fashion just metres away from her home?

Agius Galea offered a somewhat half-hearted apology for his remarks a few hours later but, as the Institute for Maltese Journalists said in a statement, an apology is not enough.

"An apology isn't enough. His comments confirm how out of touch members of the administration remain with the stark and dangerous reality faced by journalists in Malta. As the fourth estate, journalism plays a critical role in our democracy, yet those in power continue to downplay the systemic risks that threaten it," the IĠM said.

"The state's responsibility and the climate of impunity that enabled the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia are not matters of opinion - they are established facts. An independent inquiry had found that all the evidence it had heard led to a conviction that Caruana Galizia's assassination was either intrinsically or directly linked to her investigative work," the institute continued.

To change the culture of how journalists are treated, the government must first understand that the culture exists in the first place. After so many years, some, it seems, are yet to reach that understanding.