Updated 5.40pm
Yorgen Fenech was questioned by the police on Thursday afternoon and then charged in court accused of attempting to import weapons from the dark web.
Fenech was interrogated over his attempts to purchase weapons, ammunition, and poison through the use of cryptocurrency Bitcoin, following the conclusion of a months-long investigation.
It is understood that police have evidence that Fenech not only inquired about buying weapons from black market arms dealers but also paid for them using cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
There is no evidence the weapons ever made it to Malta.
However, according to the Arms Act, the acquisition of weapons through illicit trafficking carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years. The police’s counter-terrorism unit has been working on the case for several months, roping in international counterparts.
In court, Fenech pleaded not guilty to the charges, with his lawyers asking why the police were in a rush to arraign him.
But the police rebutted the accusation, saying though investigations were still ongoing, they could only prosecute on the strength of information they received on Wednesday.
Buying weapons on the dark web
The attempted weapons purchases, sources said, were made on what is known as the dark web, a part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines as it is considered a hotbed of criminal activity.
In particular, the police investigation is also looking into attempted purchases that have been traced between Fenech and traders on a now-defunct site, which is known as Wall Street Market, a trading platform tied to global terrorist groups.
The once-bustling bazaar of illegal drugs, arms and other black-market products was shuttered in May 2019 on the back of a years-long investigation by a number of international law enforcement agencies that saw some 200 people arrested.
One of the sellers Fenech corresponded with is understood to have been a fraudster who would lure in clients with the promise of top-quality weapons and ammunition, in a ‘take the money and run’ type scam.
Times of Malta first reported in September 2020 that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had flagged online searches by Fenech for poison, only a few months before he was arrested for complicity in the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Then, later that month, George Cremona, who heads the police’s CTU, told a court how another attempted purchase, this time for a handgun, ammunition and a silencer, had been linked to Fenech’s St Julian’s address and named his deceased father as the buyer.
The purchases were for weapons that are identical to those used by Maltese law enforcement, a detail that has so far puzzled investigators.
They included a Glock pistol and silencer, two Scorpion automatic assault rifles, some 800 rounds of ammunition, and two grenades.
Attempted cyanide purchase
The local investigation has zeroed in on one suspicious $50,000 transaction made from one of Fenech’s wallets in January 2019 to a seller active on the dark web site.
A high-level law enforcement source said it has not yet been established what Fenech may have been attempting to purchase from the site for this amount of money.
Another smaller transaction of $2,098 in April 2019 has been linked to the attempted purchase of 1g of lethal poison potassium cyanide.
In messages between users of the site, the package of the deadly poison was set to be mailed to Fenech’s Portomaso Tower address.
Meanwhile, the international investigation that took down Wall Street Market is sifting through a mountain of data after the site’s, and its partners’, servers were seized in Germany.
Times of Malta is informed that local law enforcement officers have sent a request for information to their German counterparts that is being facilitated by EU agency Europol.