A picture doing the rounds by e-mail this week showed the accosting of a tourist coach on a public road by a bunch of hooligans supposedly on strike (some with their fat bellies exposed in defiance of mores of decency).

Surely this situation constituted violent, criminal assault aggravated by breach of public peace and freedom, arising from 'unlawful assembly'. I admire the poor lone policeman near the bus, bravely trying to keep some order.

He was outnumbered 100 to one. The protesters stopped the bus and forced tourists to come off and walk. Shame! We all know about the chaos caused at the airport and at the cruise liner terminal, on the roads leading to Valletta, in Marsa and elsewhere. The protesters acted according to a careful plan: their actions were not spontaneous, but orchestrated.

The whole thing reeks of a strategy designed 'not' merely to protest, but to bring Malta to a standstill. This is all patently illegal. It's evident that the police did their very best, especially in emergencies like the rush on Castille, but still arrests were few and far between. Why?

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