One Thursday morning 67 years ago, Toninu Aquilina left Valletta’s South Street with over £15,300 in cheques and £1 notes.

It was a trip to the national bank on Republic Street that the Malta Millers Association messenger had done numerous times.

However, on February 24, 1955, Aquilina did not make it to the bank. He did not make it home either. The police first suspected he had run away with the money. The air and seaports were put on the alert.

“Sadly, his body was discovered two weeks later by members of the Civil Defence on a training exercise near the Għallis Tower at Baħar iċ-Ċagħaq. Aquilina had been shot in the back of the head,” crime historian and former police officer Eddie Attard recounts.

Aquilina’s was the first murder that Dom Mintoff was faced with soon after he was elected premier and became minister responsible for the police.

“The police force was in a very bad state back then. Once Aquilina’s body was lifted out of a well, the police abandoned the place. This was their first mistake as hundreds of people went to the site afterwards. The suspect’s interrogation was delayed – he was arrested, interrogated and released multiple times.

“This worried Dom Mintoff… and in May 1955 he told parliament that since no one in the police force had scientific knowledge of crime, he had asked Scotland Yard for backup. At the time Mintoff had an excellent relationship with the British.”

The investigation into the murder took a turn with the arrival of Inspector Albert Victor Griffin, Sergeant Henry William Pugh and Lewis Nicholls, director of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory of Scotland Yard.

Nicholls found fibres in a car with registration number 12764, which a bank cashier, George Terreni, had hired on February 23. The fibres matched those of the sack that covered Aquilina’s corpse.

The investigating team also found flakes of red and white paint on some of Terreni’s clothing that matched paint at the entrance to Għallis Tower. However, the most important circumstantial evidence was a piece of plywood found near the body that belonged to a box found in the rented car.

In 1956 a jury – split eight to one – found the accused guilty.

“I am informed that one juror was not actually convinced that the man was not guilty. He voted in that manner as he was against the death penalty and knew that a death penalty can only be handed down in the case of a unanimous vote,” Attard added.

Terreni was out of jail after eight years, following a series of amnesties in his favour.

Following the Għallis Tower murder, Mintoff commissioned a report by WA Muller, Inspector General of Colonial Police, about how the government could reform the police force.

The extensive report, which also suggested the employment of female officers, kicked off a process for a forensic laboratory in Malta, among others.

The Għallis Tower case was the first murder that Attard remembers quite vividly. It was also possibly the one that majorly influenced his future career choice.

“I was eight years old at the time of the murder. I remember listening to a programme on the Rediffusion, when, all of a sudden, broadcast pioneer Effie Ciantar says ‘F.A.T. fat, F.A.T. fat’.

“The public had no idea what the code meant, but at the time it was the police’s only way to send an alert across the island about the Għallis Tower murder. It was only wrapping up the Għallis Tower murder case that the force’s cars were equipped with a wireless communication system.”

As a teenager, Attard also collected True Detective magazines, and by the time he completed school at the age of 16, he knew he wanted to enrol in the force. He made it past the minimum height requirement by a quarter of an inch, and in 1966, aged 18, Attard joined the force.

He spent some months as a constable in the community, but also worked at the contraventions’ department, and separately, the human resources department at the Floriana headquarters. By 1976, he was roped into the team behind the police force’s monthly magazine.

When he was tasked with writing about crime cases, he realised that while the force lacked an archive, the government did not keep statistics on crime.

And that is how Attard set about reading every article published in every local newspaper since 1800, painstakingly documenting every little detail about crime cases in Malta. He has since published 48 books and numerous articles about crime in Malta.

Għallis Tower murder’s 12 firsts:

  1.          First time a murder was mentioned in parliament

  2.          First trial built on circumstantial evidence

  3.          First trial by jury that lasted 15 days (until then, trials would, at most, take a week)

  4.          First time a reward (£3,000 equivalent of 10 years’ worth of a constable’s salary) was offered for information on the murderer

  5.          First time a body was exhumed for an autopsy

  6.          First time Scotland Yard flew to Malta to help with the investigation

  7.          First Maltese crime covered by the British Press

  8.          First time police statements were documented

  9.          First time the Attorney General carried out the compilation of evidence

10.          First time evidence was sent abroad (Italy) for investigation

11.          First time the word ‘fibres’ was used in a local murder investigation

12.          First trial by jury, with 100 court exhibits

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 This article is being published as part of a series called Malta’s hidden treasures, a collaboration between the National Archives of Malta and Times of Malta. The project, forming part of the European Digital Treasures co-funded by the European Union through the Creative Europe programme, allows readers to gain an insight into Maltese history, society through our archives.

You can discover more at the National Archives of Malta headquartered at the historical building of Santo Spirito in Rabat and other archives. If you are unable to visit the archives in person, you can access an online oral and visual archive on www.memorja.com

The website is the main repository of recent Maltese national and public memory and hosts hundreds of recollections dating back to the 1920s.

More information about the national archives on 2145 9863 or customercare. archives@gov.mt