Valletta, Sept 2. (dpa/GNA) – Businessman Yorgen Fenech, has been acquitted of masterminding the car bomb murder of journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, nearly nine years after her killing, a jury in Valletta ruled on Wednesday.
A jury cleared the 44-year-old businessman of both complicity in murder and criminal conspiracy. The verdict was decisive, with the jury voting eight to one in favour of acquittal. The jurors had retired earlier in the morning to deliberate and reach their decision.
Fenech is one of Malta’s wealthiest men. Caruana Galizia was killed on October 16, 2017, when her car was blown up near her home. The 53-year-old was considered one of the country’s best-known investigative journalists. She had been investigating corruption in politics and business.
Her murder is regarded as one of the most high-profile killings in the history of the small EU member state. Three contract killers including two brothers, pleaded guilty several years ago, and are now serving prison sentences of between 15 and 40 years.
Two other men, convicted for supplying the bomb used in the fatal attack, received life sentences.
Fenech was arrested in November 2019, as he was sailing his yacht out of a marina he owns in the upmarket St Julian’s district of Malta.
The prosecution’s case rested on evidence from his chauffeur, Melvin Theuma, who confessed to having acted as an intermediary in the murder, and received a pardon in exchange for his testimony.
The arrest, and suspicions that senior government officials were also involved, triggered nationwide protests in December 2019, that forced then-prime minister Joseph Muscat to resign.
Fenech, a member of one of the island state’s most influential business families, located south of Sicily, was a director of the power station consortium that Caruana Galizia had been investigating intensively before she was murdered. It was this connection that brought Fenech to the attention of investigators after the killing.
Theuma said he had acted as an intermediary between the killers and Fenech, who he said was the person who commissioned the murder, and that Fenech had given him €150,000 ($173,877).
He supported his account with recordings and text messages in which he and Fenech had discussed the contract killers and the murder investigation.
Fenech acknowledged knowing about the murder plans, but said his former friend Keith Schembri had framed him for the killing. He said Schembri was the true mastermind behind the murder. At the time, Schembri was chief of staff to then-prime minister Muscat.
Caruana Galizia’s family reacted with disappointment to Fenech’s acquittal, saying it denied the journalist the justice she deserved.
The family said the day should have been hers. Their statement added that the institutional failures that had made her murder possible had still not been addressed.
GNA