Every day for 17 years, Antonio Gatt and his family lived in fear of what the court was going to decide after he was charged with conspiring to deal in drugs.

The family knew he was innocent – all he had done was collect a parcel, containing what he believed to be auto parts, for his brother.

But the wait was a nightmare, prolonged through no fault of their own, until the day, nearly two decades later, that he was cleared of all charges.

“The day my husband was arrested was the day the catastrophe began. We were victims for 17 long years,” his wife,  Catherine, 67, says.

“We should not have had to wait that long. No one should. We suffered so much and every time we hear that other people are facing these delays we remember that suffering.”

Malta’s justice system is notorious for court delays and the issue resurfaces from time to time. Last month, 25-year-old Jean-Marc Dalli was sentenced to three months in prison over a case concerning six ecstasy pills that had happened when he was 18.

That case reignited calls for swifter justice and spurred Justice Minister Edward Zammit Lewis to admit concern over “justice delayed”.

A recent report by the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice showed that court cases in Malta take between double and eight times as long to be concluded as the average in the European Union.

It is taking far too long to solve this problem, Catherine notes.

“There are people’s lives involved,” she says as she sits on a bench beside her husband, now 72, in the small garden of their Paola home.

The couple want to talk about what happens “backstage” to the people living the case.

Antonio is still rattled by it all. Tears stream down his face and soak the facemask he wears. Catherine does most of the talking.

“You see that statue of Our Lady,” she says, pointing to a corner in the garden. “I prayed to Her all the time and She heard our prayers… we suffered so much. They called my husband a drug baron. Us?

“He had a humble job as a courier and I was a maid cleaning people’s houses.”

She clasps her hands – unmanicured hands, the type that have toiled for a lifetime, strong.

They put me in Division 5. They were not my kind of people

“Had it not been for Kate and my children I would not be here today,” Antonio says quietly.

It all started in April 2001 when his younger brother, Lawrence, asked him for a favour. He was to pick up a parcel containing auto parts. Back then, Antonio was a security driver at Malta Freeport in charge of collecting the mail.

Sure enough, the packet he collected at the airport, which had arrived from Canada, was marked car parts. The next thing he knew he was surrounded by the police who had been carrying out a controlled delivery.

The parcel turned out to contain just over two kilogrammes of cocaine.

“I didn’t know what was going on. The police took me in for questioning and searched my home,” he says.

That day, Catherine arrived home from work to find the police searching their house. A few days later, Antonio was charged with conspiracy to deal in drugs and importation together with another three men. His brother died before the case was concluded and the other two received lengthy jail terms. 

Denied bail, Antonio initially spent four months in prison. It had an impact on his mental health. 

“It was a horrible experience. I was taking eight pills a day. They put me in Division 5. They were not my kind of people,” he recalls.

His wife adds: “He was crying all the time. We would go to visit him. I would have gone to the ends of the earth to see him. I would leave work, in my cleaning clothes, to go.”

Released on bail, he first went under house arrest, then curfew, signing the bail book once a week.

Antonio fell in a depression. Apart from being tormented by the pending court case, he had been betrayed by his younger brother.

“We never spoke after that. He never said a word. He never told them I had nothing to do with it. It still hurts,” he says.

As the years rolled on, the family could not make plans.

“It was like having something hanging over us. We could not plan. We did not know what was going to happen. We had to file a court application for Antonio to come to our daughter’s wedding,” Catherine recalls.

“We suffered a lot. Our name was tainted. When the case started, our son was about to get married and our daughter had just started dating her current husband. People gossiped.

“But the people who knew us well – our neighbours and relatives – stood by us.”

Meanwhile, there was the financial burden as Antonio was suspended on half pay for three years, before being rehired by the Freeport, and the family had their assets frozen.

Finally, judgment day – July 2018 – arrived. Antonio was cleared of all charges. The magistrate found not the slightest shred of evidence that he could have had the least suspicion as to the illicit contents of the packet and noted he had been betrayed by his brother.

“When we heard the magistrate read out the acquittal, I wanted to shout. I ran out into the court corridor to tell relatives there: he’s free,” Catherine recalls thanking their lawyers, Joseph Giglio and Sarah Mifsud, among others along the way.

A year later the family won a constitutional case and were awarded €10,000 in damages due to the delays.

“It was not so much about the money. No amount can give us back what was taken from us,” Catherine says.