Updated 8.15am with video

Criminal investigations into open cases must continue and must be “intensified” in cases such as Lino Cauchi’s in the hopes that there may someday be “full closure” for the victims, Robert Abela said on Friday.

The Prime Minister also said that the government will not be appealing the court’s decision to award the family €615,000 in compensation for the breach of rights as the government will try to “make good out of what happened”.

“The court said that, in some way, there will be some form of closure which is why we will be paying the compensation established in the sentence.”

Lino Cauchi was among the handful of accounting practitioners in Malta in the late 1970s and early 1980s until his sudden disappearance on February 14, 1982, when the 32-year-old left his home in Santa Venera for his office in Valletta and never returned.

More than three years later, on November 15, 1985, the remains of a human body were found by the police in a shallow well in the area known as Il-Bosk, near Buskett Gardens in Rabat. They were later identified as Cauchi's.

The case was never closed and in 2020, Cauchi’s widow and son filed constitutional proceedings against the Prime Minister following a judicial letter which still failed to register any progress.   

A newspaper cutting from 1983 about the Cauchi murder.

The civil case was closed on Thursday when Cauchi’s family were awarded €615,000 in compensation when the courts found the police’s investigation was rife with mistakes such as valuable evidence not being preserved and eventually lost forever.

Although it is disappointing to see how little headway this case has made since his disappearance, on Thursday our courts made a swift decision, Abela said.

“This sentence should be a template of the length or the period in which one should wait for justice to be served when they are opening a case of both civil and criminal nature,” he said.

“But I also appeal that investigations of a criminal aspect must continue and must be intensified because, for us, it is unacceptable that you have cases like Karin Grech, like this case and others where there isn’t full closure for the victims.”