Two fugitives found in Libya this week were hiding out in a large villa in a mountainous town, after narrowly evading capture in Italy.

Jomic Calleja Maatouk and his wife Marzia had only been in Gharyan, a town 80km south of Tripoli, for a few weeks before they were located by Libyan law enforcement on Thursday.

Marzia Calleja Maatouk was found dead. Jomic Calleja Maatouk was captured alive, close by. He is now being held in Tripoli and will appear in a Libyan court. Maltese authorities have asked for his extradition to Malta, where he faces a number of criminal cases.

Sources told Times of Malta that Libyan authorities have yet to carry out an autopsy on Marzia’s body, to determine the cause of death. Initial indications, however, have ruled out any foul play.

The couple escaped Malta last summer, weeks after they were both sentenced to time in jail for separate crimes. Marzia Calleja Maatouk’s family told Times of Malta at the time that she vanished without warning and left the house she and Jomic shared in a state of disarray.

Intelligence later placed the fugitive couple in Italy, and Malta worked with Italian authorities over the ensuing months to pinpoint their precise location.

Their capture appeared imminent. But just as Italian police prepared an operation to arrest the couple, they were on the move again.

Using fake passports, they crossed into Libya

Using fake passports, they are believed to have crossed the Mediterranean into Libya, a sprawling, sparsely populated country where they believed they could more easily avoid detection. 

They then made their way to Gharyan, a town of around 170,000 people in Libya’s Nafusa mountain range with a strong Berber population. There, they moved into a villa and hid away from public view.

Intelligence sources believe they leveraged Jomic Calleja Maatouk’s knowledge of the dark web to make enough money to get by.

Jomic, who was described as “highly intelligent and tech savvy” by sources, was well-versed in navigating the internet’s fringes. 

He previously operated a Bitcoin-linked car trading business and also frequented illicit marketplaces on the dark web – parts of the internet that are hidden from search engines like Google.

A 'lethal weapon' who was ready to unleash 'the gates of hell' on whoever crossed his path- Jomic described by a magistrate

It was an interaction on one such marketplace that led to his most recent conviction in Malta: a five-year jail sentence for having bought C-4 explosive online, after trying and failing to procure doses of lethal poisons like ricin.

When sentencing him, a magistrate described him as a “lethal weapon” who was ready to unleash “the gates of hell” on whoever crossed his path.

His wife, Marzia, also had a run-in with the law. Last August, she was sentenced to 15 months behind bars for conspiring to traffic cannabis, after she was caught in a car in Birkirkara with more than 300 grams of the drug.

Jomic, who was her boyfriend at the time, was with her in the vehicle at the time. It is not known when her body will be transported back to Malta.