Panama Papers Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia Was Blown Up in Her Car — Hitmen Jailed, Jury Now Has the Alleged Mastermind

Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was described as a “one-woman WikiLeaks” after she led the Panama Papers investigation, was killed on the afternoon of October 16, 2017, by a car bomb detonated near her home in Bidnija.

Galizia’s career was devoted to exposing establishment corruption, and her most recent work revealed that Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides had connections to offshore companies tied to the sale of Maltese passports, and that they had allegedly received payments from the government of Azerbaijan, according to a report from The Guardian.

During a press conference on the attack, Muscat acknowledged Galizia’s work, saying, “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.”

Galizia’s son was unconvinced. He called Muscat a “clown” who was exploiting the moment by “making statements to parliament about a journalist he spent over a decade demonizing and harassing,” just hours after her death.

“Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, Chris Cardona, Konrad Mizzi, the Attorney General and the long list of police commissioners who took no action: you are complicit. You are responsible for this,” Matthew Caruana Galizia wrote in a Facebook post that named a long list of elected officials.

My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists. But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so. 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.

Daphne Caruana Galizia will be remembered as a remarkable investigative journalist who risked her life to expose corruption among the elite. One of her most notable endeavors was helping bring the revelations of the Panama Papers to light — a leak of 11.5 million documents that detailed financial information from more than 200,000 offshore accounts and exposed how the wealthy and powerful across dozens of countries hid money through shell companies.

Matthew Caruana Galizia is himself an investigative journalist who worked alongside his mother and was part of the international team behind the Panama Papers. He wrote that he was nearby when his mother’s car exploded with a blast so powerful that it threw the vehicle and her into a nearby field.

I am never going to forget, running around the inferno in the field, trying to figure out a way to open the door, the horn of the car still blaring, screaming at two policemen who turned up with a single fire extinguisher to use it. They stared at me. ‘I’m sorry, there is nothing we can do,’ one of them said. I looked down and there were my mother’s body parts all around me. I realized they were right, it was hopeless.

Mr. Galizia said he told the police at the scene, “My mother is in the car. She is dead. She is dead because of your incompetence.”

While some called Daphne Caruana Galizia’s death “tragic,” her son said he believed “this was no ordinary murder and it was not tragic.” He argued that “when there is blood and fire all around you, that’s war. We are a people at war against the state and organized crime, which have become indistinguishable.”

Mr. Galizia also claimed that “one of the police sergeants who is supposed to be investigating her murder, Ramon Mifsud, posted on Facebook, ‘Everyone gets what they deserve, cow dung! Feeling happy :)'”

Yes, this is where we are: a mafia state where you can now change your gender on your ID card (thank God for that!) but where you will be blown to pieces for exercising your basic freedoms. Only for the people who are supposed to have protected you to instead be celebrating it. How did we get here? A culture of impunity has been allowed to flourish by the government in Malta. It is of little comfort for the Prime Minister of this country to say that he will ‘not rest’ until the perpetrators are found, when he heads a government that encouraged that same impunity.

Mr. Galizia accused Muscat of filling his office, the police force, and the courts with crooks, imbeciles, and incompetents. “If the institutions were already working, there would be no assassination to investigate — and my brothers and I would still have a mother,” he wrote.

Where the Case Stands

In the years that followed, the family’s accusations of state complicity were substantially vindicated. A public inquiry concluded in July 2021 that the Maltese state bore responsibility for creating a “culture of impunity” that enabled the murder, and it found that the government had failed to recognize and neutralize the risks to her life. Mounting public protests over the botched investigation forced Joseph Muscat to resign as prime minister in January 2020, after his chief of staff Keith Schembri was questioned in the probe.

The men who carried out the bombing have been brought to justice one by one. Brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio each received 40-year sentences in October 2022 after pleading guilty to procuring, planting, and detonating the device; an appeals court upheld those terms in November 2023. Vince Muscat (no relation to the former prime minister) pleaded guilty in 2021 and was sentenced to 15 years after turning state’s witness, and self-confessed middleman Melvin Theuma received a presidential pardon in 2019 in exchange for his testimony. In June 2025, Robert Agius and Jamie Vella were convicted of supplying the military-grade explosives used in the bomb and sentenced to life imprisonment; the Court of Appeal confirmed those life sentences on January 21, 2026, rejecting claims that the terms were excessive.

The alleged mastermind finally faced a jury. Businessman Yorgen Fenech — a powerful hotelier with close ties to senior government figures, arrested in November 2019 aboard his yacht as it left Malta — denies the charges of complicity in murder and criminal association. Prosecutors allege he supplied roughly €150,000 to pay the hitmen and gave the order to detonate the bomb. After more than five years in pre-trial detention, Fenech was released on bail in February 2025. He lost a last-minute constitutional bid to halt the proceedings, and on July 1, 2026 his trial opened at Malta’s Criminal Court in Valletta. The attorney general is seeking life. By mid-August the trial had passed its 36th sitting, with Theuma on the stand for consecutive days. On August 3, 2026, Daphne’s son Matthew Caruana Galizia testified about the day of the bombing. On August 21, Judge Edwina Grima rejected a defense bid to dissolve the jury, and Fenech took the stand in his own defense — unusual for a murder accused — and told jurors he never ordered the killing. Over four days on the stand he went further. He said police had framed him, and when Judge Edwina Grima asked who the real mastermind was, he named Keith Schembri, Muscat’s former chief of staff. Schembri has not been charged with the murder. Prosecutor Godwin Cini told Fenech his fingerprints were all over the case. In closings the Crown said Fenech had his hands stained with Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blood. Defence lawyer Charles Mercieca spent two days on what he called the hidden hand and invited jurors to swap Fenech’s name for Schembri’s. On August 31, 2026 — day 53 — the judge began summing up. The jury has the case. No verdict has been returned. Press-freedom groups note that many of the public inquiry’s institutional reform recommendations remain unimplemented, and that full justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia will not be served until everyone responsible for her assassination is behind bars.

For more of The AEGIS Alliance’s reporting on elite networks and the officials who stall them, start with Hiding In Plain Sight and our International News.