The Daphne Caruana Galizia Murder Case

The story so far

As of September 2, 2026

This is the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the investigative journalist killed by a car bomb in 2017, and Malta’s long effort to establish who ordered it. Two of the hitmen, brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio, were jailed for 40 years in 2022. The alleged mastermind, businessman Yorgen Fenech, was tried for complicity in the killing and for taking part in a group formed to carry it out; on September 2 a jury acquitted him 8 to 1 after roughly two months of proceedings.

At trial, the state’s case rested on Melvin Theuma, the self‑confessed middleman who received a presidential pardon in November 2019. He said Fenech summoned him to arrange the assassination and provided the money. Prosecutors pointed jurors to secret recordings and messages in which Theuma raised figures like €150,000 for the job and a €120,000 share, and to phone data around Bidnija that lined up with his account of when the plot paused and resumed. They also set out the business pressure on Fenech at the time, including exposure of his Dubai company 17 Black and problems at the Electrogas project, arguing that ordering or funding a crime makes a person as responsible as those who carry it out.

The defense worked to break that chain. It attacked Theuma’s dates and credibility, said his pardon had been promised before Fenech’s arrest, and argued key meetings he described could not have happened when he claimed. It tried to shift suspicion toward former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, and highlighted what it said were missed investigative leads. The judge instructed jurors to disregard a set of Theuma messages the prosecution had cited in closing because they were not in evidence. The jury then cleared Fenech on both counts.

The acquittal leaves the question of who ordered Caruana Galizia’s killing unresolved in court. A separate judicial inquiry into the murder remains open and confidential. What is at stake now is whether Malta’s system can still establish who commissioned an attack that, after Fenech’s 2019 arrest, helped bring about a prime minister’s resignation, or whether the case will end with the bombers punished and no conviction for whoever paid for the crime.