Daphne Caruana Galizia's last words on her own blog accused her country of being crooked, minutes before a car bomb ended her life. Nine years, five convictions, and one long-delayed trial later, Malta is only now hearing the case against the man accused of ordering it.
Daphne Caruana Galizia's final blog post accused a senior Maltese official of pleading in court "that he is not a crook," and closed with a line that has been quoted more often since her death than almost anything else she ever wrote: "there are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate." Minutes after publishing it on October 16, 2017, she left her home in Bidnija in a leased Peugeot 108. A bomb planted inside the car detonated as she drove, killing her instantly. She was fifty two.
Caruana Galizia had spent nearly a decade running a blog called Running Commentary that functioned, in a country of roughly half a million people, as something close to a one-woman investigative unit, and her reporting on the Panama Papers had directly implicated senior figures in Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat's government, including his chief of staff, Keith Schembri, and a cabinet minister, Konrad Mizzi, in undisclosed offshore companies. She had also pursued allegations, ultimately unproven, that Muscat's wife controlled a secret company called Egrant. At the time of her death, she faced forty eight pending libel suits.
Investigators identified the men who planted and detonated the bomb relatively quickly, though prosecuting them took years. Vince Muscat, who went by the nickname il-Kohhu and was not related to the prime minister, pleaded guilty in February 2021 and received fifteen years in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors. The brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio pleaded guilty in October 2022 to wilful homicide and related explosives charges and were sentenced to forty years each. All three were, by the state's own account, hired hands rather than the people who wanted Caruana Galizia dead.
The men accused of supplying the explosives took longer to convict, and involved a correction to how the case has often been summarized. Robert Agius and a man named Jamie Vella, not a second member of the Agius family as sometimes reported, were convicted by a jury on June 5, 2025, of supplying the military grade explosives used in the bombing and were sentenced to life imprisonment. Both appealed. In January 2026, Malta's Court of Appeal rejected the appeal in a two hundred page ruling, finding that life imprisonment "was neither excessive nor disproportionate given the gravity of the crimes."
That alleged mastermind, the businessman Yorgen Fenech, was arrested in November 2019 while attempting to leave Malta by yacht, and was held for more than thirty months, denied bail more than twenty times, before finally being released on bail in January 2025. He has pleaded not guilty to charges including complicity in murder, membership in a criminal organization, and illegal weapons offenses; prosecutors have alleged, among other things, that he purchased cyanide, hand grenades, and submachine guns on dark web marketplaces. His trial on the murder complicity charge finally opened in Valletta on July 1, 2026, nearly nine years after the killing, with a verdict originally expected the following month.
Five men have now been convicted of building, planting, or detonating the bomb that killed her. The trial of the man accused of paying for it did not open until nearly nine years after her death.
A public inquiry convened to examine the Maltese state's own responsibility for the conditions that allowed the killing concluded, in a report delivered in the summer of 2021, that the state had helped create what has been widely summarized as a pervasive atmosphere of impunity around Caruana Galizia's reporting, one that made her murder foreseeable rather than freakish. Joseph Muscat announced his resignation as prime minister on December 1, 2019, following the arrest of his own chief of staff in connection with the case, and formally left office the following January after his party elected a successor.
Caruana Galizia's son, Matthew, a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists who was among the first people at the scene of the bombing, has continued to press for the case's full resolution through the foundation established in his mother's name. Nine years after her death, that resolution remains incomplete: the men who built and detonated the bomb are convicted, the men who supplied its components have exhausted their appeal, and the trial of the man accused of ordering it all is, as of this writing, still underway.
Caruana Galizia's case became, almost immediately, a test of the European Union's willingness to treat a member state's press freedom crisis as a matter for Brussels rather than Valletta alone. Her son Matthew, who had worked with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on the Panama Papers before her death and was among the first people to reach her burning car, has continued to press European institutions to treat Malta's handling of the case as a benchmark for the rule of law across the bloc, alongside his brothers Andrew and Paul and their father, Peter, a Maltese lawyer. The Egrant allegation that had consumed much of her final reporting, the claim that a secret company belonged to Prime Minister Muscat's wife, was ultimately not substantiated by the magisterial inquiry that examined it, a detail her critics have cited since as evidence that her reporting sometimes outran what could be proven, even as her supporters note that the far larger body of her Panama Papers work, implicating officials who did eventually resign or face prosecution, held up entirely.