Five years after Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a huge car bomb explosion outside her home, the trial of two brothers who are accused of killing her has begun.
Alfred and George Degiorgio are being charged with setting off the bomb that killed the journalist, who was 53 years old. The defendants, who could get life sentences if they are found guilty, pleaded not guilty.
Friday, many of Caruana Galizia’s family members sat in the front row of the public gallery in the courtroom in the capital, Valetta.
George said he did it in an interview with the news agency Reuters earlier this year. A lawyer for the two brothers also said that they wanted to be forgiven if they told “everything we know about other murders, bombs, and crimes.”
Their request for a pardon was turned down, and the five men and four women on the jury have been told to only think about what they hear in court.
The indictment says that George set off the deadly bomb from a yacht docked off the coast of Malta while Alfred and another accomplice, Vincent Muscat, kept an eye out. Caruana Galizia was killed right away on October 16, 2017, when the bomb went off.
“Some of her body was thrown out of the burning car, while other parts stayed inside,” the document says.
Muscat and the Degiorgios brothers were arrested in December 2017 and have been in jail ever since. Muscat admitted to taking part in a 2021 plea deal in exchange for information, and he is now in jail for 15 years.
The long-awaited trial is the result of an independent investigation by one serving judge and two retired judges. They found that the highest levels of power in the government at the time created a culture of impunity. The results of the inquiry, which were released in July of last year, suggested that the “tentacles of impunity” that stretched from regulatory bodies to the police led to a “collapse in the rule of law.”
It also said that the government had not done enough to keep Caruana Galizia’s life from being in real danger right away. When the report was read, it was clear that Caruana Galizia’s investigative work had something to do with her death, either indirectly or directly.