Malta Jailed the Bomb Makers in Daphne Caruana Galizia’s Murder and Acquitted the Man Accused of Paying
The men who built the bomb that killed Daphne Caruana Galizia are in prison. The businessman prosecutors accused of paying for it walked out of a Valletta courtroom a free man.
That split is the fact Malta is living with. On the evening of September 2, 2026, a jury of six women and three men acquitted Yorgen Fenech, 44, of both charges on the indictment: complicity in the voluntary homicide of Caruana Galizia, and associating with others to commit a crime in Malta. Each count fell 8-1. Judge Edwina Grima discharged him on the spot. Relatives at the defense table shouted. Members of the journalist’s family wept. If the jury had gone the other way, the attorney general was seeking life.
Caruana Galizia died on the afternoon of October 16, 2017, when a bomb detonated in her car near her home in Bidnija. She was 53. For years she had run the blog Running Commentary as a one-woman newsroom. Colleagues called her a one-woman WikiLeaks because she published what institutions would not. She was not the global editor of the Panama Papers. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists coordinated that leak of 11.5 million offshore records. What she did was publish the Malta file: shell companies, a passport-for-cash scheme, and the names of people close to power, including then-prime minister Joseph Muscat’s inner circle.
Muscat said the line every official says. “Everyone knows Ms. Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine, both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way.” Her son Matthew, a journalist who had worked the Panama Papers, was not interested in the eulogy. Within hours he named Muscat, Keith Schembri, Chris Cardona, Konrad Mizzi, the attorney general, and a string of police commissioners, and called them complicit. He wrote that his mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and the people trying to violate it, and because she was the only person still doing it. “This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist. Which makes her the first person left dead.”
He had been nearby. The blast threw the car into a field. He described the horn still sounding, two officers with a single extinguisher, and then what was left of her on the ground. He told police she was dead because of their incompetence. The family did not call it a tragedy. When there is blood and fire, Matthew wrote, that is war, and the state and organized crime had become hard to tell apart.
A public inquiry, published in July 2021, put that theory in an official report. The board found the Maltese state had created the atmosphere of impunity in which the murder became possible, and had failed to recognize the risk to her life. The assassination, the inquiry said, was tied to her journalism. Protests over the stalled police work had already forced Muscat out. He resigned in January 2020 after Schembri, his chief of staff, was questioned. Resignation is not a conviction. Neither man has been charged with the murder.
The people who touched the explosive did not get that ambiguity. Vince Muscat, no relation to the former prime minister, pleaded guilty in 2021 and took 15 years as a state witness. Brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio pleaded guilty in October 2022 to procuring, planting, and detonating the device and each received 40 years. An appeals court upheld those terms in November 2023. Robert Agius and Jamie Vella, convicted in June 2025 of supplying the military-grade explosive, are serving life. The Court of Appeal confirmed those sentences on January 21, 2026. Middleman Melvin Theuma received a presidential pardon in 2019 in exchange for testimony. Five men are in prison for building or setting off the bomb. The question the jury was asked was who bought it.
Prosecutors said Fenech, heir to the Tumas Group, commissioned the killing because Caruana Galizia was about to publish more about his business, including the Electrogas deal. They said he paid Theuma about 150,000 euros to hire the hitmen and later fed him information about the police investigation. Fenech was arrested in November 2019 aboard his yacht as it tried to leave Malta. He spent more than five years in pre-trial detention, won bail in February 2025, and sat in the Criminal Court from July 1, 2026. The trial ran 55 sitting days. More than 100 witnesses testified. Matthew Caruana Galizia testified on August 3 about the afternoon in the field. Fenech then did something murder defendants in Malta rarely do. He testified. He told jurors he never ordered the killing, said police had framed him, and named Keith Schembri as the real mastermind. Schembri has denied wrongdoing. Police have said Schembri was never a suspect. The jury deliberated about eight hours. Not guilty, 8-1, twice.
The recordings did not save the prosecution. Times of Malta later published encrypted Signal chats between Fenech and Theuma that jurors had already heard. In one, Fenech tells the middleman, “Put your mind at rest. No one can touch me.” On the eve of Theuma’s arrest he tells him to be sure “everywhere is clean.” Fenech admitted in court that he knew Theuma was recording him. Theuma has said the tapes were insurance. In a September 13 interview with Times of Malta he said he had told the truth and that the acquittal did not change what he knows. The jury heard that version and did not convict. An ugly chat is not, by itself, a verdict.
The attorney general did not accept the 8-1 as the last word. On September 22, 2026, prosecutors filed an appeal. Reuters reported that a jury-trial appeal in Malta is limited to points of law, and that the Court of Criminal Appeal can order a retrial if the interests of justice require one. The filing does not overturn the acquittal. The family cannot appeal on its own. Matthew Caruana Galizia has said the family supports the prosecution’s appeal. Article 500 of the Criminal Code sets a high bar. “Grave irregularity” is a narrower door than public anger.
A separate police inquiry opened under the verdict. Three jurors, a reserve juror, and the husband of a juror were arrested and questioned over social-media posts they are alleged to have written before the trial, and over a suspicion that one juror had a phone while sequestered. Reuters reported they were released on police bail and that no charges had been filed. Police said the investigation concerned the oath and prior comments. Corinne Vella, the journalist’s sister, said the arrests raised the suspicion that something had gone very wrong in that jury. Until a court says otherwise, the acquittal stands.
What the verdict did not touch is the public inquiry. Repubblika said a jury answered the question put to it, the answer was shocking, and the inquiry’s finding that the state built the impunity is a different document. Five years on, the Committee to Protect Journalists says most recommended reforms are still unimplemented: a Freedom of Information Act that actually answers, real protection against SLAPP suits, and a system that treats threats against journalists as a state problem. Muscat, on September 9, said he was “baffled” by the verdict and argued the inquiry should have waited until the criminal case ended. The family’s line, reported by the BBC, was shorter. Nine years on, the failures that enabled the assassination remain unaddressed. Corinne Vella said everybody is more at risk, because the signal is that you can kill a journalist with impunity.
A European politics newsletter reported on September 30 that members of the European Parliament were preparing to travel to Malta to look at the rule of law after the verdict. Vigils that have run for more than a hundred months turned, on September 16, into a march through Valletta. The AEGIS Alliance has covered what happens when a state treats a journalist as a problem rather than a check, including the years Julian Assange’s family spent fighting an extradition. The Malta file is more intimate. The bomb makers are serving their sentences. The man the state accused of writing the check is not. The appeal will say whether that 8-1 was a lawful end. It will not give Daphne Caruana Galizia back the afternoon in Bidnija.
More from The AEGIS Alliance is in International News and Politics. The ICIJ account of the acquittal and the BBC’s report from the courtroom are the public record of the night the forewoman spoke.