Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1400707
3 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 11 AUGUST 2021 NEWS NICOLE MEILAK ENEMALTA has a short-term contin- gency plan to ensure this week's heat- wave causes as little disruptions as pos- sible to the electricity supply, the Energy Minister said on Tuesday. Miriam Dalli said Enemalta had emergency procedures to avoid long power cuts at times like this. "We are making sure that more re- sources are deployed, with continued monitoring particularly at those vul- nerable points, so that wherever we have a power cut it's addressed as soon as possible." This would help decrease the length of the power cut, she added. Last week, Enemalta apologised for the power cuts that affected several lo- calities, the cause of which were faults in the distribution system. Enemalta CEO Jason Vella said the higher demand for electricity as a re- sult of heatwaves in the past couple of weeks exposed weaknesses in the dis- tribution network that buckled under the stress. Two cable faults even left Marsaskala residents without electricity for almost 20 hours. Vella explained that in the case of Mosta and Marsaskala, multiple faults on the same network developed which limited the company's ability to re- store electricity as quickly as possible by rerouting supply. Enemalta has contingency plan for heatwave CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 He had since been held in custody at Mount Carmel Hospital without any means of communication, the lawyer said. "This arrest is illegal, and with or without cure, Grech appears to have recovered," his lawyer Rachel Tua said, presenting documentation from medical profession- als saying Grech cannot be incarcerated without any prospect of being freed. Tua is asking the courts to hear witness- es previously involved in Grech's psychi- atric assessment to determine whether there are still grounds for his continued detention. Habeas corpus is a legal rem- edy whereby a person claiming unlawful detention or imprisonment is brought before a court to have the legality of the arrest examined. Such cases are always regarded as urgent. Grech, an engineer from Mosta, had been charged with animal cruelty, vio- lation of burial grounds, trespassing on religious grounds, forcing entry into the Mosta parish church and the Speranza chapel, and vilifying the Catholic religion. The hangings and crucifixions of dog and cat carcasses around Mosta dated back to 16 October 2011, with the last case taking place on 3 February 2014. In the last inci- dent, a dog and cat were found hung up- side down at the side and on the front of the Mosta Church. Grech would find dead animals to hang, claiming that it was his way of "passing on a message against animal cruelty". In a website he has been running from the mental health facility he is incarcerated in, Grech documented the entire saga of his psychiatric evaluations, the medicines pre- scribed, his complaints to mental health commissioners, and his protestations at specialist psychiatriat Dr David Cassar's evaluations of his mental condition, whom he blames for his prolonged detention. Grech was already committed back in 2002 on a diagnosis by David Cassar due to paranoid psychosis, schizophrenia, and mental alteration. Grech has complained to the Commis- sioner for Mental Health on several occa- sions, as well as the Ombudsman and the Chairman of Psychiatry, over the side-ef- fects he was incurring from the adminis- tration of Fluanxol. In a complaint to mental health commis- sioner John Cachia, the ombudsman re- quested Cassar to prescribe Grech a med- icine that causes "less side effects". Instead Grech was administered Risperdal Consta, a long-acting injection, which the inmate claims causes him just as many severe side-effects. "Every time you are injected this diabol- ic poison you feel humiliated, helpless... forced by a pimp into prostitution... You know another part of you, of your health, is lost but can do nothing other than seeing your strength go away a bit by bit," Grech wrote in his online blog. Grech complained that he suffered from difficult to sleep due to the injection and Parkinsonism in his left leg. He also said medical doctors doing ward rounds made light banter of the Risperdal's side-effect of impotence, by jokingly suggesting the prescription of a specific medication to re- verse that effect. "He is killing and disabling me slowly slowly, first with the injection Fluanxol that so much makes you sick with depres- sion that it makes you commit suicide, and then with injection Risperdal which besides making you suffer from depres- sion, with it he was also making me sick with Parkinson disease amongst others, and now with Olanzapine that makes you drowsy, suffer from delirium, and can in- crease your blood pressure and disabled me left me suffer from impotence amongst others with their side effects" Grech says that in 2011, despite his past problems of psychiatric evaluation, he had been leading a relatively ordinary life, and that he regularly engaged in exercise as a cyclist. It was during these cycling treks that he would encounter roadkill, where- upon he decided to use the carcasses of animals run over by cars, to make his state- ment. "At the end I decided that instead of leav- ing them stranded on the roads, utilise some of them and hang them crucified in several places in my hometown Mosta. In a country where the agenda of the polit- ical parties is primarily dictated from be- hind by contractors and speculators who finance them... (I) opted for a method that is entirely original and at the same time harms no one but nevertheless creates a sensation..." Grech wrote. "I asked myself if a crucified animal would make them think of those forgotten chameleons, frogs, hedgehogs and snakes to mention a few which get killed and bull- dozed from their habitats because of this greed." Grech details in his long statement of having hanged 15 animal carcasses on 12 occasions over the period of two years, six of which in broad daylight, all bar one oc- casion on the 16th of the month. "One can say that I managed to break a record... there was a Police force where those assigned to the case were truly without vision that couldn't predict the obvious most obvious: in fact the biggest record was made by them, where despite the consistencies I used in the dates, in the choice of places and always in the same town, they never succeeded in catching me red-handed, neither getting out of home, neither walking with the cumbersome of the wooden cross with the animal carcass on it tied to my belly, and neither hanging it." Grech admits he had been careless in not deleting images of the carcasses from his laptop. "They would not have had the slightest proof to incriminate me, neither the slightest finger print nor any DNA evidence, and during interrogation I sim- ply told them of a CD I had at home con- taining all the information and history like from where I had collected the dead animals, etc., to convince them even more than they were already convinced that I had killed no animals." In August 2020, Dr David Cassar ap- proved a restriction on Grech's freedom to communicate from Mount Carmel Hospi- tal. Nicholas Grech was charged with having crucified dead animals and vilifying the Catholic religion 'Grech appears to have recovered' - lawyer