The Daphne Caruana Galizia public inquiry resumes tomorrow. It’s been a dramatic series of hearings. The last episode ended with not one but two twists, though public attention fell on just one. A pity.
The twist no one missed is Robert Abela’s brazen attack on the inquiry. He has left its future in question. The panel is investigating the state but the state’s prime minister wants us to think it’s the judges who are in the dock and he who will judge them.
Their transgression: they want to be thorough, which takes time. (Though they’re not taking longer than this kind of inquiry would take, for instance, in the UK). Abela has insinuated a darker motive, one he understands: money. Now the panel has declared it’s ready to keep working without payment.
The missed twist? The panel announced that it received a sworn written statement, from a private citizen, challenging something declared by Joseph Muscat in his testimony. Somehow the full significance flew overeveryone’s head.
The citizen is Mark Anthony Sammut, not the PN politician but the notary and son of the novelist, the late Frans Sammut (1945-2011). He has challenged the veracity of Muscat’s declaration that he never tried to incite hatred against Caruana Galizia.
Remember, Sammut had his own heated run-ins with Caruana Galizia, having been an object of her mockery. His father was very close to Alfred Sant. Sammut told the panel his father was also on good terms with Muscat and had high hopes for him.
However, some time after Muscat became Labour leader, he personally invited Frans Sammut to contribute to ‘a blog intended to attack Caruana Galizia personally’. “The idea,” Sammut junior declares, “was to publish personal stories about her and her family.”
Frans Sammut, who I remember being as fiery as a musketeer but also with a musketeer’s sense of honour, turned the invitation down. And told his son about it.
If this declaration contradicted some incidental aspect of Muscat’s testimony, it would be bad enough. It’s worse than that.
What blog was set up to attack Caruana Galizia and her family personally after Muscat became Labour leader but before Sammut died? Only one. The vile, anonymous Taste Your Own Medicine.
Was this the blog Muscat had in mind? We don’t know. Maybe he dropped the idea. Maybe Sammut’s memory is unreliable or his father misunderstood.
Would it be fair for the panel simply to announce this information and then leave it dangling?
It needs sifting for Muscat’s sake as much as for Caruana Galizia’s.
The panel is accused of taking too long and of betting everything on a single hypothesis. Neither accusation is true.
The inquiry needs to determine whether the way Caruana Galizia was targeted politically was responsible or irresponsible- Ranier Fsadni
If the panel’s job were to decide only if the state played a direct role in the assassination, then nine months would have been enough. You don’t need more to see if there’s a smoking gun linking agents of the state to the killing. The gun is there or it isn’t. Nor does it take much time to ascertain if Caruana Galizia deserved police protection that the state culpably withheld.
But the task is also to decide if there was an indirect role. Here the task is laborious. A rush to judgment is irresponsible. The matter can only be settled by answering two complex sets of questions.
First, were Caruana Galizia’s anti-corruption investigations the only credible threat to anyone making millions illegally? Not if all the authorities were doing their job in following up reasonable suspicions. In that case, her reports would be the least thing to worry about.
If the authorities were sleeping on the job, or had allowed the system to be all stitched up, then an indefatigable journalist could plausibly be seen as the one person who made all the difference between success or failure. In which case, getting rid of her becomes a strong temptation.
The panel is accused of following only one hypothesis concerning who might have been so tempted. Not so.
In asking many questions about the Electrogas consortium and the Vitals Global Healthcare deal, the panel is certainly testing the general hypothesis that Caruana Galizia was a credible, serious threat.
It’s establishing whether there existed a pattern of opacity, weak monitoring and stalled investigation.
But those questions do not prove anyone’s guilt. They merely establish that she was the only plausible threat to grand corruption. The line of inquiry doesn’t exclude that Caruana Galizia’s death may have been ordered by someone she hadn’t yet even begun to investigate.
The panel isn’t doing a Perry Mason, revealing the guilty party during cross-examination. It’s simply trying to determine if the state, indirectly, made killing Caruana Galizia a profitable proposition.
Second, having become tempted to kill her, could the person (or persons) who commissioned the murder have been led – or misled – into believing that they could kill her with impunity?
Here the inquiry needs to determine whether the way Caruana Galizia was targeted politically was responsible or irresponsible. She did have a political target on her back. But was she targeted in a way that could encourage others to cross all limits?
Hence why it matters if any hatred directed towards Caruana Galizia could be traced back to the state. Hence why Sammut’s declaration about Muscat matters. Muscat was opposition leader at the time but (as he so helpfully reminded the panel) that is a state role too.
It’s entirely possible to accept Keith Schembri’s claim that it was he who wanted the FBI involved, with Muscat’s approval – and still find the state responsible for having previously created the conditions that led to her assassination.
The inquiry is doing its job, pursuing delicate questions fairly, not glibly. It’s not closing off competing hypotheses.
It’s revealing that Schembri and Muscat now urge the inquiry to depart from its proper job. They told the panel to look at the motives of other people, outside government, such as in the media (on the flimsy excuse that the media, metaphorically, is the fourth branch of the government).
Tracking who could be behind the assassination is the job of the police. For a long time Muscat resisted setting up the inquiry with the excuse that it would interfere with the criminal investigation. Now he urges de facto interference.
If that’s the best he can do, the inquiry looks like it’s doing just fine.