Valletta Cultural Agency chairman Jason Micallef has asked the police to investigate comments against him on social media including from a woman who warned him "to be very scared".
Describing the comments as being "serious threats" to his life, his decision to call in police is the latest escalation in a dispute between the former Labour general secretary and Repubblika president Robert Aquilina.
On Monday, Micallef posted a picture of him walking out of the police headquarters in Floriana alongside his lawyers, Labour MEP candidate Daniel Attard and Ishmael Psaila, after presenting reports to the police against comments he said were made by Repubblika supporters.
“I’ve seen them always play the role of martyrs or victims (...) that is why it is no longer acceptable that they threaten and harass us, and pretend that we will not take steps against them,” he wrote.
Some of the comments he has reported were insults directed at Micallef and family members, with others described Micallef as a “trash can full of rubbish”.
One comment read “look how powerful Gaddafi was, how powerful Saddam Hussein, and how powerful [Ceaușescu] was, you get the gist... be scared be very scared”.
A handful of the hate-fueled comments against Micallef on Reppublika's head Robert Aquilina's Facebook. Photo: FacebookThe quarrel between Aquilina and Micallef began last Saturday during a discussion programme hosted by academic Andrew Azzopardi on RTK.
Micallef repeatedly described Aquilina as an "agent of hate" saying that he and his Repubblika associates had a crazy and dangerous obsession with persecuting former prime minister Joseph Muscat.
He also accused Aquilina of playing the martyr, after he said he had a string of court decisions showing he was the actual victim of hate speech.
Aquilina took to Facebook to reply, stating that Micallef's "savage" attack was made on the instruction of Muscat and the motive was to dehumanise him. He also called on the prime minister to publicly dissociate himself from the remarks made by Micallef.