Updated 1.56pm

The Education Ministry on Wednesday said it had terminated contracts of a person who used a ministry PC to change the Wikipedia profile of Dutch MP Pieter Omtzigt. 

The official had been working with the ministry as a consultant for the past five years.

The decision, announced on Wednesday by the ministry, was taken after a "technical investigation", the ministry said.

Mr Omtzigt is the Council of Europe rapporteur on the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia and the rule of law in Malta. The Dutch MP has been very critical of the state of affairs in Malta and also criticised the controversial cash-for-passports scheme, saying that it could be a vehicle for money laundering. 

His Wikipedia page was edited last October to include the sentence "In 2017 Omtzigt was embroiled in a fake news affair on the MH17 Malaysian Airlines Crash where he paid for fake evidence in order to put the blame on Ukraine and exonerate Russia. He was asked to resign but refused."

The edit was made in October by an anonymous user from a computer with an IP address traced to a Maltese government ministry. It was reversed by a different anonymous user one month later, on November 15. 

Mr Omtzigt's Wikipedia profile was edited to include this reference.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that is maintained by volunteers around the world. Anyone can edit Wikipedia pages, with edits tracked and publicly visible through its system. 

The ministry announced that it had terminated the worker's contracts one day after a parliamentary question about the incident. 

In a reaction to the ministry's decision, Mr Omtzigt observed that the edited information had been used by the prime minister and others in an attempt to discredit him. "They wanted to undermine my hard report on Malta, the rule of law and the murder case in October," he said in a tweet.

Mr Omtzigt asked who had commissioned the changes to his profile.   

On Tuesday, Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri told parliament that police investigating the Wikipedia change had concluded that there was no crime.

Dr Camilleri told Nationalist MP Claudette Buttigieg that the police had looked into the case but concluded that “there were no elements constituting a criminal act”.

He added that other internal investigations, the nature of which he did not disclose, that did not fall under his ministry’s remit.  

Ms Buttigieg asked questions about the case to several ministers, including Education Minister Owen Bonnici, who referred her "to the responsible minister".