The nurses’ union never interfered with the treatment of prisoner Abner Aquilina but merely requested a police presence for safety reasons, union chief Paul Pace has said.

Pace was reacting to comments made by Aquilina’s defence lawyer Mario Mifsud in court last week.

The lawyer claimed Aquilina was sent back to prison because he was being treated inhumanely and kept locked in a room at Mount Carmel Hospital for 23 hours a day. 

He argued it was “the first time in Malta’s history” that a union decided how a patient at the mental hospital was to be treated, rendering a magistrate’s decision to move him there ineffective. 

Mifsud’s comments followed an instruction by the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses for members to abandon their ward if Aquilina was moved there. 

Aquilina, who has now been transferred to the Corradino Correctional Facility, is pleading not guilty to strangling and murdering 29-year-old Polish student Paulina Dembska on January 2, 2022. 

Following his arraignment over the murder, Aquilina was remanded in custody after pleading not guilty.  

When the compilation of evidence started, Magistrate Marse-Ann Farrugia raised the issue of insanity and appointed three psychiatrists to assess the accused’s mental state. 

In June last year, experts reported that Aquilina was insane at the time of the offence. The magistrate ordered that he was to be detained at Mount Carmel Hospital. 

"The unit is classified as a prison and is under the sole control of the prisons’ director"

That order could only be reversed upon a subsequent report by three psychiatrists declaring that he could be discharged from hospital. 

However, two months after the magistrate’s order, the hospital’s CEO Stephanie Xuereb filed an application before the Criminal Court requesting that Aquilina be transferred to the hospital’s Forensic Unit. 

The unit is classified as a prison and is under the sole control of the prisons’ director.

Xuereb argued that the hospital had no licence to care for inmates with mental health problems, and that these were to be handled at the Forensic Unit. 

That request was upheld by a judge in the superior court and the transfer took place. 

Aquilina’s lawyers then filed an application requesting the Magistrates’ Court to reverse the judge’s decision. They argued that whereas in hospital Aquilina was receiving adequate treatment and was marking progress, his situation changed when he ended up at the unit, which was a “halfway” arrangement between a fully equipped hospital ward and a prison.

About a month ago, Magistrate Farrugia upheld the defence’s request and ordered Aquilina back to the hospital, the only place where he could lawfully be held at that stage. 

He was detained at the Multi-Purpose Unit, which consists of single rooms where patients are kept until they can be moved to other wards. This promoted a complaint from the nurses’ union, which said the unit was not equipped to handle patients like Aquilina and requested constant police backup. 

In the absence of police protection, the union ordered its members to abandon the ward they were in if Aquilina was moved there. 

Two police officers were eventually assigned to Aquilina but following his lawyer’s complaint, he was transferred to Division 5 at the Corradino Correctional Facility last week.