Joseph Muscat has accepted the conclusions of the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry despite having "serious reservations" about it.
In a reaction on Facebook, the former prime minister said he was doing so out of respect for the institutions.
"I do hope that others will accept the result of other inquiries by members of the same judiciary, such as the Egrant case, rather than continuously casting ill-founded doubts on them", Muscat wrote.
The public inquiry into the journalist's October 2017 murder pinpointed Muscat's role in creating a culture of impunity that emboldened criminals to carry out the assassination.
Muscat reiterated that when he stepped down as prime minister, he was doing so to shoulder responsibilities which were his and also those which were not.
"I paid the ultimate political price for this".
Muscat said the events of October 2017 had made him resolute not to act like his predecessors who paid lip service but did nothing about homicides that rocked the country.
The former prime minister again expressed reservations about the inquiry's "departure" from its original terms of reference.
He noted the inquiry did not find any evidence the state was involved in the assassination, nor that it had any prior knowledge of the plot.
"The report also unequivocally states that I was in no way implicated in the murder. While the inquiry expressed its disapproval on my political judgement in the aftermath of the Panama Papers, it failed to point out that I took the decision to fetch another mandate in the following months, where the electorate judged me even on how I managed the situation."
He accused the inquiry of failing to acknowledge that the alleged hitmen were apprehended in less than two months and the alleged mastermind a few months later, following investigations involving amongst others Europol and FBI.
Three suspects were charged with carrying out the bomb plot in December 2017.
Business magnate Yorgen Fenech was arrested in connection with the murder two years later, after Europol threatened to walk away from the investigation over the police's reluctance to apprehend self-confessed murder middleman Melvin Theuma.
Muscat said the arrest of the suspects disproved any "impression of impunity" that the alleged perpetrators had.
"I maintain that there was impunity in cases before my term in office, where high profile crimes were committed but nobody was ever prosecuted".
Muscat, who retired from politics last year, questioned how Opposition leader Bernard Grech appeared to have advanced knowledge of the inquiry findings.
"One wonders how he knew about these details or if it is customary for him to agree beforehand with something he did not know the contents of. Moreover, the fact that extracts from the report found themselves in the public domain before the actual publication is questionable."