A man was sentenced to a six-month jail term suspended for one year on Friday for posting a Facebook comment saying that MEP Roberta Metsola should be burned alive. 

Emmanuel Navarro was found guilty of all charges after the incendiary post posted last November. 

Mr Navarro, 66, had been charged with misuse of electronic equipment, inciting hatred, insulting and threatening Dr Metsola and breaching an earlier conditional discharge.

He had written: "All of you, especially you [Metsola], you're a national traitor. It's not a condemnation you deserve, but to be burnt alive, you dung."

The accused was also bound under a personal guarantee against a penalty of €5,000.

The threatening Facebook post.

Reacting to the sentence, Dr Metsola, a Nationalist MEP said: "I will not comment on the sentence handed down to the person who threatened to burn me alive, except to say this was a case brought by the police. From my end, I had accepted his apology and asked the court that he not be jailed."

Still, Dr Metsola said there should be absolutely no space for hate online or in political discourse.
 
"We cannot accept people spreading hate in our society. My skin is thick enough to take whatever is thrown at me as a representative of the people, but I owe it to all the young women who are looking to get into politics to try to make this step easier for them. Politics should be a battle of ideas not of threats – and I will always stand up to hate and to misogyny."

Lawyers Jason Azzopardi and Karol Aquilina appeared for Dr Metsola. 

Lawyers Franco Debono and Peter Paul Zammit were defence counsel.