My family and I spent years calling for justice. We were harassed and made out to be enemies of our own country by Muscat. Yet we persisted because we knew that something was deeply, deeply wrong with the investigation. What I heard in court today confirms that we were right:
The middleman, Melvin Theuma, was testifying. Yorgen Fenech commissioned him to hire a gang of hitmen to assassinate my mum, the day Muscat announced a general election in 2017. The plan was put into motion as soon as Muscat won the election, a month after calling it.
Theuma testified that after the murder he was angry at Fenech and called him "a traitor" over the phone with a friend. We were piling pressure on Malta and they were feeling it. Muscat's office, which is responsible for all phone taps in Malta, tipped off Fenech about this call.
How do we know Fenech was tipped off? Because he chastised Theuma for speaking about him on the phone, then told him to call back, from his tapped phone, and say that Fenech was "a traitor" because he denied Theuma permission to station another taxi at his hotel.
If Theuma went along with this plan (he didn't) it would have given the criminals working under Muscat an excuse to stop the investigation from moving in Fenech's direction. They could say that the angry phone call had nothing to do with the murder after all.
It is clear that Fenech was working with Muscat's office to throw off police investigators, as part of a wider plan and actions by Muscat's office to cover up the assassination. Yes, we were right to suspect everyone, up to and including the Prime Minister.
How did we get here? The criminals protected by Muscat were emboldened by the fact that they were able to get away with kleptocracy for years. When my mother exposed it, they covered up the investigations, then tried the same with the investigation into her murder.
Will Europe listen the next time journalists expose high-level corruption? Will @vonderleyen create mechanisms that kick into place automatically, preventing the murder of a mum, when the head of a government begins to protect criminals? This is our fight now.
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