Updated 9.50am
Banners promoting two separate MEP candidates were taken down and stolen this weekend, the candidates said.
Independent MEP candidate Arnold Cassola said banners he had installed in Mġarr, Gozo and Xewkija both vanished between Friday and Saturday.
Banners promoting Nationalist Party MEP candidate Peter Agius in Marsascala and Xemxija also mysteriously disappeared, Agius said separately.
Cassola said that he had filed a police report in Victoria about the banners' removal.
“Apart from revealing that certain cowards still exist in our country, this episode fills me with great courage,” Cassola said in a statement.
“There are those who are in strong fear that, on June 8 next, the 58-year PNPL duopoly is going to implode and a third Maltese voice is going to enter the European Parliament for the first time.”
The two banners were hung in Mġarr and Xewkija and encouraged voters to “cast a vote for integrity” by voting for Cassola.
In a police report he filed on Saturday evening, Cassola told Victoria police that he knew the banners were still in place on Friday. He encouraged officers to use footage from CCTV cameras in their vicinity to identify the culprits.
Cassola told Times of Malta that a fellow MEP candidate alerted him to the banners' sudden disappearance.
He discovered that his banners were missing shortly after Peter Agius reported the disappearance of his own banners.
"These banners were installed legally and are an important way for us to be able to reach voters, given that PBS is controlled by the Labour Party and the government is dishing out cheques on the eve of an election," Agius wrote.
"I will not be intimidated by vandals and will continue to work day and night to be there for you."
Cassola, an academic and activist who has been involved in local politics for decades, is campaigning on a platform focused on environmental issues, good governance and social justice.
Among the 39 candidates running for MEP in the June 8 elections, he is the most experienced, having contested every MEP election in Maltese history.
In 2004 – Malta’s first-ever MEP elections – Cassola won almost 25,000 votes, representing Alternattiva Demokratika. He would go on to contest two more MEP elections as an AD candidate before quitting the party and running as an independent in 2019.
Agius, who is a lawyer by profession, served as head of the European Parliament office in Malta and then within the secretariat of then-EP president Antonio Tajani.
He first ran for an MEP seat in 2019. Polls suggest he is well-placed to obtain a seat in the June 8 elections.