Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1044434
25 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 28 OCTOBER 2018 OPINION Radio France, for instance, had earlier quoted witnesses who claimed to have seen Cardona in the company of one of the three suspects at Ferdinand's Bar in Siggiewi. One of those witnesses has now supplied a different ver- sion of events to the police: claiming that he saw those two individuals at the same bar, yes; but at different times, and not in each other's company. (Separately, the CCTV footage seen by the investigators also seems to substantiate this lat- ter version.) Admittedly, this takes us no closer to the truth. The wit- ness might be lying now, just as he might have been lying then. But let's face it: if you've got it stuck it in your head that 'Cardona is guilty' – and you have a good excuse to, with all this media misinfor- mation flying around – you'll be far likelier to suspect that the witness lied to the Maltese police, than to Radio France. That's what happens when the media concoct their own hyper-realities surrounding real events: it becomes harder, not easier, to determine what really happened. Still, if it's any consolation to the Daphne Project: they are not alone in making such a dreadful mess of things. I have likewise lost count of Euro- pean politicians, MEPs and institutions that have com- pletely got the wrong end of the stick when it comes to this particular murder investiga- tion: choosing to jump straight to the part where they pro- nounce a guilty verdict… then sitting back, and hoping that the facts will sooner or later prove their intuition right. One of these great European crime-busting luminaries even took the trouble of writing up a blueprint for us, detail- ing the specifics of how (not) to solve a murder. Dutch MP Pieter Omtzigt recently pre- pared a preliminary report for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on the investigation into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia and the rule of law in Malta. He said he would proceed with his report on the basis of three working assumptions: 1) that the murder was "planned and premeditated long in advance"; 2) that the persons ultimately responsible for Caruana Gali- zia's death "were motivated by her investigative work", and; 3) that the "three arrested suspects were most likely act- ing under instructions". Well, what do you know? All three of those assumptions are entirely gratuitous, if not downright flawed. The first hinges on the unanswerable question: how long is 'long'? That it was 'planned and pre- meditated in advance' is self- evident; but how long does it take to execute a planned and premeditated murder of this variety? Weeks? Months? Years? It makes a difference, you know. Just as there was a world of difference between what Daphne was blogging in the months and weeks before her death, and most of what she used to blog about before the June 2017 election… and then again, between the various phases of her entire output since she first started blog- ging in 2008. (And why stop there? She'd been writing in newspapers since around 1990. So how far back do we go, in search of the 'investiga- tive work' that triggered her murder?) This brings me to assump- tion number 2, which takes the extraordinary initiative of simply dispensing with any other possible murder motives altogether. What makes Omtzigt so certain that Daphne was killed because of one of her investigative stories? How does he know it wasn't a 'planned and pre- meditated' act of retaliation, by one (or more) targets of some of Daphne's less inves- tigative, more personal style of blogging? And please note: I'm not asking which of these may appear the likelier sce- nario to you personally (which is just as well, because I'd only get two opposite answers, depending who 'you person- ally' are). What I'm asking is… how does Pieter Omtzigt – or anyone else, for that matter – KNOW? You do, after all, need to KNOW certain things: especially if you're going to arbitrarily decide not to pursue any of dozens of other perfectly possible (plausible, even) leads… just to focus exclusively on your own pet theory, which for all we know might be completely off the mark. The third assumption, however, is arguably the most insidious. Why is it 'most likely' that the three arrested suspects were 'acting under instructions'? As earlier indicated, all three are believed to have been involved in an illegal smug- gling racket worth hundreds of millions a year. Daphne investigated this racket on a couple of occasions (hence the phone-calls, above); so if – hypothetically speaking – three criminals decided that this one person was threaten- ing their lucrative dealings… why would they need some- one else to order the assas- sination? Why not do just it themselves, on their own ini- tiative, and on the basis of one of the most classic organised crime murder motives known to man? Again, just to avoid any misunderstandings… I'm not saying that's how it happened. But that is certainly how it might have happened: and to simply 'assume' otherwise, in the absence of any real knowledge, is… idiotic, quite frankly. And like all other exam- ples of European media and political dilettantism associ- ated with this case… it is also extremely unhelpful, to say the least.