Police ‘no comment’ on Keith Schembri murder search
Schembri, who was a murder suspect, was allowed to 'indicate' to police which devices should be seized
Police have declined to comment about the way searches of Keith Schembri's home were conducted by investigators.
Jurors in the murder trial against businessman Yorgen Fenech heard on Monday how assistant commissioner Keith Arnaud instructed officers to only seize electronic devices flagged to them by the former OPM chief of staff.
Two scene-of-crime officers involved in the November 2019 search of Schembri’s villa told jurors they were ordered by Arnaud to only seize devices “indicated” to them by the former OPM chief of staff.
Shown photographs depicting two mobile phones left behind during the search, one officer said: "We were only meant to take what Keith told us to take, and nothing else.
“We never conduct searches that way,” police sergeant Mario Azzopardi testified.
Replying to questions by Times of Malta about the unconventional search, a police spokesperson said: “Given that currently a trial by jury is underway, the police would not comment any further”.
At the time of the search, Schembri was being treated as a potential suspect in the October 2017 assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Two searches were carried out at Schembri's Mellieħa villa on November 26, 2019.
Arnaud says he and fellow murder investigator Kurt Zahra drove to Mellieħa at around 6am to arrest Schembri, after he was implicated in the assassination by Fenech, who was under arrest.
During this first search, Schembri claimed to have “lost” his mobile.
The phone was last active at 5.04am in the Mellieħa area.
Later that same day, scene-of-crime officers headed back to Schembri’s villa for a second search.
It was during this second search that the officers were instructed to only seize devices “indicated” to them by Schembri.
Questions have also been raised by Fenech’s lawyers about the search conducted at Schembri’s office in Castille.
The office was never sealed off by police and the search was carried out on December 5, 2019, a week after Schembri had already been released from arrest.
Defence lawyer Giannella de Marco observed how no laptop or desktop computer was visible in Schembri's office, describing such an absence in 2019 as unusual.
She also noted that while jurors saw a handwritten document with the words "DCG" being photographed, the footage did not appear to show investigators seizing it.
Inspector Charlot Casha, who filmed the search process, told jurors he was there solely to document the searches and did not know what investigators were looking for or what material they ultimately removed from the office.
He also testified that, as far as he had been informed, the Castille search formed part of the inquiry into alleged leaks from the murder investigation rather than the murder inquiry itself.