Live blog: Melvin Theuma had €800,000 in cash, Fenech trial told
Yorgen Fenech is pleading not guilty to complicity in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia
The trial of Yorgen Fenech continues on Saturday as prosecutors continue to make their case against the businessman accused of complicity in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Jurors have been hearing prosecution witnesses testify for the past weeks. On Friday, the court heard testimony from former OPM security officer Kenneth Camilleri and Fenech's business associate Johann Cremona.
Camilleri told the court that Fenech's friend and OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri had instructed him to visit murder middleman Melvin Theuma to "calm" him.
He said that event - along with a brief exchange with a stranger in Valletta - left him fearing for his life.
Cremona ended his two days of testimony with an outburst in which he alleged that Fenech's lawyers had secretly met with Keith Schembri one day before Schembri testified in the case's compilation of evidence in 2020.
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Live blog
Theuma's property deals
12.54pm Defence lawyer Giannella de Marco notes that Melvin Theuma sold a shell apartment for €140,000 in 2020 and a garage for €20,000.
Melvin Theuma's will
12.41pm Identity Malta lawyer Sonya Consiglio tells the court that ownership [not physical] searches related to the case revealed that Melvin Theuma had drawn up a will on December 7, 2017 [two days after the three murder hitmen were charged in court].
Another search revealed that Edgar Brincat had in the past sold Melvin Theuma a garage.
Translations and searches
12.29pm The court is hearing testimony from a lawyer tasked with translating testimony from English to Maltese, and another lawyer involved in carrying out property searches as part of the case inquiry.
Schembri's Gmail and WhatsApp
12.14pm A juror wants to know: A lost mobile can be cloned. Is it possible to clone or preserve the phone data from lost phones?
Cutajar explains how there are many different types of data, stored in different locations and for different periods of time.
But his answer to the question fundamentally boils down to one key point: without the device in question, an exact clone is impossible. And to obtain data stored on the cloud, you need passwords for those services.
A juror asks: So Keith Schembri’s Gmail [which was accessed] was not linked to his WhatsApp account?
Cutajar: Correct.
That’s all from the witness.
Hearing resumes
12.05pm The court hearing resumes with more questions for the witness.
Fireworks force hearing to be suspended
11.35am Earlier this week, a power cut forced the judge to suspend a court session in this case. Today, it’s fireworks.
Fireworks are being let off somewhere in the vicinity of the courtroom, and they’re so loud they're making people jolt out of their seats.
The judge is forced to suspend the sitting for 30 minutes.
Questions by jurors
11.33am A juror has a question for Cutajar: So none of the devices seized from Keith Schembri’s home were his own?
Cutajar replies: “Those were the devices I was given,” he says. He explains that it is normal to seize all devices found in a home, even those belonging to children, as they can also be used by a suspect.
The juror also asks about keywords searched for on the devices. Would only exact matches show up in searches, he wants to know (e.g. would a search for ‘Fredu’ give results for ‘Fred’ too?)
Cutajar explains that searches are done for both exact matches as well as similar results.
Defence: We do not have Camilleri and Cremona data
11.16am De Marco wants more information about data on phones belonging to Johann Cremona and Kenneth Camilleri.
The witness explains that the specialist German firm did that work. He then flew to Germany to collect the devices and handed them over to another court expert, Martin Bajada.
But de Marco has an issue: the defence does not have access to data extracted from those phones, she says.
The witness says he was not responsible for analysing data on the devices.
Expert: I was not present for Schembri search
11.02am The witness confirms he was not given Schembri’s phone to analyse. He had no WhatsApp or Signal chats of Schembri’s to analyse.
He also confirms he was not present when police searched the property, even though “normally, experts are [present during searches].”
Instead, the devices were given to him by the police after a magistrate instructed him to extract data from them.
Devices at Keith Schembri's home
11am Defence lawyer Giannella de Marco has some questions for the IT expert.
He confirms he was unable to extract data from two devices seized from Keith Schembri’s Mellieha home: an iPad and an Asus tablet.
Data on the other devices seized there seemed to belong to Schembri’s family members, not Schembri himself, he says. The Macbook, for instance, had data belonging to Schembri’s daughter on it.
Extracting data
10.58am A couple of other tasks Cutajar had – extracting data from a cloned 4TB hard drive (to double check the extracted data, due to some gaps in the original extraction paperwork done by Europol) and enhancing the audio of a CD with an interrogation of doctor Adrian Vella.
Unlocking Camilleri and Cremona phones
10.55am Cutajar was also tasked with unlocking Johann Cremona’s iPhone, and two of Kenneth Camilleri’s mobiles. He needed to use brute force penetration techniques to do that – basically trying multiple password/number code combinations to unlock the devices.
He took the devices to a specialist lab in Germany to do this. They managed to open Camilleri’s devices straight away. Cremona’s mobile was unlocked some time later.
Melvin Theuma had €800,000 in cash
10.22am Melvin Theuma was found with “big bags of money”, the court hears.
He had a massive €797,000 in all, along with almost GBP£6,000 and USD$2,000.
Grand Harbour CCTV
10.15am Cutajar says security was beefed up at the compound where Caruana Galzia’s blown-up car was held.
He also extracted CCTV footage from the Grand Harbour [where George Degiorgio was seen sailing out and back in on the day of the murder].
Cutajar says he was just extracting and preserving data at this stage, not looking for anyone or any boat in particular.
The SMS used to trigger the bomb was sent from a boat out at sea.Many other tasks
10.02am Cutajar was also given various other IT-related tasks in the case:
- He was asked to clear up audio on a recording of a police interview with Edgar Brincat [Il-Gojja].
- He extracted CCTV footage from cameras near the crime scene in Bidnija
- He filed requests for mobile phone and CCTV data from service providers
- He analysed CCTV footage taken at major junctions and ports around the time of the murder
For many of these tasks, he was working under pressure because of brief data retention periods (usually 7-10 days, he says).
What keywords were searched?
9.50am Some of the keywords that Cutajar was asked to search for were briefly displayed in court.
We could make out ‘Ferdinands’, ‘Fredu’, ‘dcg’, ‘Chris Cardona’, ‘Melvin’ and ‘zwiemel’ among them.
Data on Keith Schembri devices
9.37am More specifically, Cutajar was responsible for checking devices seized from Keith Schembri and his family.
He was given two Macbooks, a Dell Laptop, iPad and Asus tablet.
He carried out cloud extractions on the devices using the e-mail address linked to them [an email address that appears to be Schembri's personal Gmail account]. ‘Cloud extraction’ means logging into device accounts and obtaining the data they have stored on the ‘cloud’ (i.e in online storage).
He also ran some keyword searches on the devices.
Cutajar says he could not extract data from the Asus tablet because it required a “unique” charger that he was unable to order from the company.
IT expert testifies
9.30am The day's first witness is IT expert Keith Cutajar. He worked on data extraction from mobile phones and other devices seized as part of the case.
Court hearing begins
9.25am The judge and jury are in court. The court hearing can begin.
Legal discussions
9.20am Lawyers are in court, but the hearing has not yet started - lawyers have some legal issues they want to clarify before jurors can be called in.
Fenech, the defendant, is being represented by lawyers Giannella de Marco, Charles Mercieca and Gianluca Caruana Curran. The prosecution is being led by attorney general lawyers Anthony Vella, Godwin Cini and Danika Vella.
Prosecutors Godwin Cini and Anthony Vella on Saturday. Photo: Jonathan Borg
Defence lawyers Charles Mercieca and Giannella de Marco on Saturday. Photo: Jonathan BorgWeeks of testimony
9am We're into the fourth week of testimony in this massive criminal case. Our journalists have been in the courtroom every single day, reporting on events minute-by-minute.
Our court correspondent Clara Farrugia has also been keeping people up-to-date in weekly Times Talk conversations with assistant editor Mark Laurence Zammit and editor-in-chief Herman Grech.
You can find all our coverage of the trial here. Our most recent Times Talk conversation is here.
Welcome
8.50am Good morning and welcome to this live blog. We're at the Valletta law courts where the trial will resume at 9am today.