Daphne Caruana Galizia had investigated corruption for more than two decades and was at the center of an investigation that sought to reveal the hidden links between a billionaire businessman and the Maltese government, when a bomb in the seat of her car ended her life in 2017. It did not, however, end her work, and now her son Matthew is trying to shed light not only on the findings that sentenced her, but on her death itself.

First modification: 08/04/2026 - 20:51

A power outage briefly interrupted a hearing on July 22 in the trial of businessman Yorgen Fenech, accused of being the intellectual author of the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, which occurred in 2017, when she was 53 years old.

It was a perfectly coincidental irony, because Caruana Galizia was trying to determine the ties between Fenech and the Maltese Government in a contract to repair the country's overwhelmed electrical grid when her car was blown up one October morning.

Now the trial against Fenech is approaching its climax, with Daphne's son, Matthew Caruana Galizia, as the exceptional witness trying to prove the links between Fenech and the woman's death.

Matthew, a software engineer and data journalist, was precisely the one who introduced Daphne to the investigation that ultimately ended her life. In 2015, he was uploading millions of files to a database for the Pulitzer Prize-winning collaborative work on the Panama Papers, when documents relevant to Malta came to his attention.

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"I had to share what I saw with my mother. I thought it was too important," Matthew said in statements to the court shared by the British newspaper 'The Guardian'.

Matthew's findings and Daphne's sources allowed him to detect that an accounting firm was helping Malta's then energy minister, Konrad Mizzi, and the prime minister's chief of staff, Keith Schembri, create offshore companies and open accounts in their names.

In 2017, shortly before his death, Daphne and Matthew were collaborating on another leak: thousands of emails from the company Electrogas, which was partially owned by Fenech, and had won a tender to privatize part of the country's electrical infrastructure, the flagship project of President Joseph Muscat when he was elected in 2013.

"I was receiving this information, I couldn't believe it, it was like a portal opened and I could see hell," Matthew said during the trial, in a statement that was objected to by the defense, considering that it was an opinion and not an objective note.

"When I started receiving the data and put it into a system so that it was traceable, I could see that Yorgen Fenech was at the center of everything. He appeared in countless emails," Matthew detailed when the prosecutor and the judge asked him to share concrete results of Daphne's discovery.

Read alsoIn Malta, the case of murdered journalist Daphne Caruana corners power

A project beyond life

The reporter and blogger planned to form a group of journalists to investigate the findings with a collaborative approach, similar to that of the Panama Papers, and had contacted 'The Guardian' to offer the article.

"We never got around to it, and in fact, when I see these emails my heart beats fast because it reminds me of that time when I was with my mother planning what to do," Matthew recalled during his testimony.

Caruana Galizia's vision did not fall on deaf ears. After her murder, her son created the Daphne Project, a consortium of journalists in which 45 reporters from media such as 'The Guardian' and the Reuters agency participated, who delved into the woman's findings, to try to find clues that would lead to establishing responsibility for the attack that ended her life.

The Daphne Project discovered that Fenech intended to pay bribes to obtain the concession for the power plant, and the subsequent pressure allowed the lines to be drawn that linked him to the journalist's death.

In the following three months after the attack, seven people identified as material authors and intermediaries were arrested and are currently serving sentences of up to 40 years in prison, but it took two more years for the Maltese authorities to order an independent public investigation into the mastermind behind the crime.

In 2019, an alleged facilitator of the homicide negotiated a presidential pardon in exchange for revealing the instigators. This is how Fenech was arrested and charged with complicity in murder, conspiracy to cause an explosion and criminal association.

The businessman has pleaded not guilty and has exchanged accusations with former chief of staff Schembri, who is not being investigated in connection with the crime.

During his court appearance last week, Schembri claimed that Fenech "said things that made me believe it could have been him who did it."

Two of the three hitmen who have been convicted, however, point out that the order came from Schembri.

Widespread protests by citizens denouncing government inaction and Prime Minister Muscat's intention to protect those closest to him ruined his government in 2020.

The life mission of a son

During his time on the stand on August 3, Matthew reconstructed the day Daphne was murdered, October 16, 2017.

"My mother prepared me something to eat. She saw that I hadn't eaten anything. She received a call and left the house," the 40-year-old man recalled in his testimony. "She came back in. She had forgotten my father's checkbook — his account was frozen at the time, and he signed the checks she could use. Then she left for the last time."

Minutes later, Matthew heard a loud explosion and instinctively started walking, at an increasingly faster pace, towards the column of smoke that he could see in the distance.

"The horn was honking, it wouldn't stop. I looked through the fire and saw a black shadow on the car. I thought, 'That's my mother.' I looked around to see if there was anything I could use to open the door," he said. "Then I saw a leg on the ground. I thought: nothing, it's over."

Matthew said that since then he had only one mission in life: to find justice for his mother: "I have put all my energy into this. This is not something a normal person should do, but we couldn't just sit idly by and wait for things to happen by themselves."

A verdict in the case is expected this month. Malta, however, still has another pending task, “establishing a national action plan on press freedom and journalistic safety,” according to a statement from the Committee to Protect Journalists, published when the process began.

With Reuters and local media

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