Valletta (AFP) – Traffic, offshore bank accounts... Maltese blogger and journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, murdered in 2017 at the age of 53 in the explosion of her car bomb, uncompromisingly denounced corruption on her archipelago in the heart of the Mediterranean.

Published on: 03/09/2026 - 12:13

Less than an hour before her car exploded, around 3 p.m., she wrote again on her blog: "There are crooks everywhere you look; the situation is desperate."

Almost nine years later, the Maltese justice system has still not established who ordered the murder of the investigative journalist.

On Wednesday, local tycoon Yorgen Fenech, who was accused, was acquitted by a court in Valletta.

In 2013, the businessman won a contract worth several million euros with the Maltese state for the construction of a gas-fired power plant on this island where real estate is overheating. He was arrested at the end of 2019 on board his yacht while trying to leave Malta.

According to the indictment, Yorgen Fenech ordered the murder of the journalist because she was about to publish a compromising article about one of his relatives.

For years on the front line, Daphne Caruana Galizia never gave in to attempts at intimidation. Like the one found one morning on the wall of his house: "If words are pearls, silence is more valuable...".

Corruption

Born on August 26, 1964, the journalist had worked as a columnist in several Maltese media, including The Sunday Times of Malta and The Malta Independent, but it was mainly through her blog, Running Commentary, followed by some 400,000 readers on an island with half a million inhabitants, that she had become known well beyond Malta.

Ignoring fear, the woman nicknamed "the WikiLeaks woman" did not hesitate to reveal the identity of her targets. Her biting and unambiguous style had earned her the nickname “poison pen blogger”.

In Malta, which is home to 70,000 offshore companies and the headquarters of the largest gambling groups, the fifty-year-old brunette, married and mother of three sons, had used her pen with vitriol against several ministers and businessmen.

Also on his hunt was the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Malta, Alfred Mifsud, accused of having been paid by the American tobacco giant Philip Morris in the early 2010s.

The mass of documents left by Ms. Caruana Galizia had been taken up by 45 journalists from 18 media outlets united in the “Daphne Project”, one of the first of the NGO Forbidden Stories, which continues the investigations of journalists reduced to silence.

Her assassination exposed corruption at the highest levels of state and caused a political crisis, pushing Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to resign in 2020. Mr. Muscat was accused of having interfered and protected collaborators in the investigation into the journalist's murder.

A public commission of inquiry concluded, in 2021, that the Maltese state “must take responsibility” for his death for creating a “climate of impunity”.

But the crisis did not prevent Mr. Muscat's Labor Party from remaining in power: his successor Robert Abela was largely re-elected at the end of May 2026.

If the sponsor(s) are missing, the perpetrators have been convicted for the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

In October 2022, two brothers received 40 years in prison each, found guilty of having manufactured, planted and detonated the bomb that killed the journalist near her home, as part of a contract worth 150,000 euros, according to the indictment in the trial of Yorgen Fenech.

Two other men were sentenced in June 2025 to life imprisonment for supplying the explosive used in the attack.

© 2026 AFP

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