A niece of murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia has urged people to boycott firms linked to the alleged murderers.

Speaking at a vigil on Tuesday to mark the 58th month since the car bomb assassination, Amy Mallia spoke of the torment she has gone through ever since the explosion.

And she expressed her disgust that years after the assassination, Caruana Galizia is still ridiculed or made the butt of sick jokes and disturbing memes by people who should know better.

She observed that the killing had been disturbingly referred to as “just business” (by one of the alleged killers) with Daphne herself being seen as a nuisance to be “dealt with”.

"It’s scary that any person can see murdering a woman – a human being - in cold blood as normal'."

It was also frightening, she said, that anyone allegedly involved in the assassination of a journalist was also still referred to as a “businessman” or a “business mogul”, rather than as a “murder suspect” she said with reference to alleged murder mastermind Yorgen Fenech.

Fenech is an heir to the Tumas Group business empire, which runs businesses in the hospitality, construction, real estate, gaming,  cargo and energy generation sectors. 

"Nobody should remain complacent when a journalist is murdered. By working with or for companies owned by these sorts of people, or by voluntarily giving them your custom – whether by just working at a call centre of theirs or simply buying a coffee from one of the establishments they co-own – you are indirectly helping to fund a whole chain of corruption and playing a part in the threat to democracy and to society as a whole," she said.

In court on Daphne's birthday

Mallia also referred to Daphne Caruana Galizia's forthcoming birthday, on August 26, when she would have turned 58.

While the family would not be celebrating it with her. some of them would instead be sitting in court facing one of the men charged with her brutal murder, she said.

"We can’t celebrate with Daphne. We can only celebrate her. We can’t even remember Daphne’s birthday in 2017 happily, because we now know that around the time she was sitting on her sofa at home opening the birthday presents we had given her – she was being watched from across the valley by alleged hitmen who were planning to kill her," she told the quiet audience.

These, she said, had been 58 months of no justice for Daphne.

"Full justice for Daphne 'must' be served she said, in what was a likely reference to pleas for a pardon or plea bargaining by the accused.

And, she also stressed, justice must be served in the lifetime of those Daphne left behind.