Malta car bomb kills Panama Papers journalist | Hacker News Reader

Malta car bomb kills Panama Papers journalist

theguardian.com

137 pointsfmihaila35 comments

That makes at least 28 journalists murdered this year that we know about. Others are likely disappeared or not popular enough to get news items.

https://cpj.org/killed/2017/

EDIT: I already sent CPJ an anonymous message mentioning the list sadly needs updating as it’s currently at 27. :’(

As a sidenote, her son is a developer, and part of the ICJ project for safely transferring and processing the Panama Papers data: https://lovinmalta.com/feature/maltese-data-journalist-works...

I'm not exactly a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but this looks like some suspicious shit to me. I can only hope it's investigated to a suitably sound set of conclusions, anything less will merely deepen the cries of modern conspiracy types.

What, you don't think it is one of those natural car bomb incidents that can happen to anybody?

Of course it's an assassination. The only paranoid conspiracy stuff comes in when you try to blame the Freemasons/Illuminiati/etc... instead of the powerful and corrupt bank executives that she inconvenienced.

To be fair, the article is poorly written. I had to read the article a few times before I understood that the victim was a target of a car bomb.

her car... was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the car into several pieces

This has some problems,

1. Passive voice; should be "a bomb destroyed her car"

2. Vague; how powerful exactly was this bomb? did it destroy nearby cars? or only hers?

3. Missing important details; was she in the car? near it?

I hate to nitpick about grammar in the context of such a grave topic, but the passive voice is not always bad, and you could make a plausible defense of its use here. The most common reason for using the passive voice is when the subject of the sentence is more interesting than the object or had already been mentioned in prior sentences, and thus is more familiar to the reader. Using familiar names and ideas aids in the overall flow of the piece and is considered good style, even at the cost of weakening a verb.

FWIW, I was taught in school that passive voice is the default mode of the English language.

There is nothing wrong about using passive voice.

I'm on Malta at the moment, (I'm not Maltese). From what I've heard this will mostly be related to local politics in Malta rather than some international coverup.

So, the powerful and corrupt bank executives she inconvenienced were Maltese?

No, the powerful and corrupt politicians she exposed from across the range of political parties in the country. Or possibly even the Mafia organizations that may or may not have been supporting those politicians.

whatever, who knows who did the deed. These guys do this for a living. You do websites /apps, they deal drugs, launder money and kill anyone that interferes with their business and doesn't stop.

Call X and call for the favor he owes us or send him 2 more kilos and kill Y. Politicians that protect the criminals can also call in favors...

Maltese love killing birds. Very bad mindset over there.

If she released those papers, she ruined a lot of people. Yeah, she was doing her job as a journo but the guy who will lose $500 mil to taxes /fines and go to jail for 20 years doesn't care much about semantics.

Princes, Prime Ministers, royal families, mafia bosses, banking execs, spies, ministers...you name it, Panama papers had them. It doesn't take much to kill an average person, they know who to call.

She didn't release the Panama Papers, that was an anonymous source to the German reporter Bastian Obermayer. She read the papers and connected them to some local figures in Malta, so presumably whoever murdered her was Maltese or had some business dealings there.

Edit: I think it's important to keep in mind too that Malta has an organized crime presence. In fact it looks like there were three car bombings in Malta last year. http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/71110/explosion_h...

The Sicilian mafia has a strong presence on Malta. A local told me that when Italy cracked down hard on the mafia, many moved their base of operations there, especially to launder money.

As a result, Malta has seen a lot of mafia-related violence the last decade [1], with 2013-2016 seeing a record 16 murders, almost all of them unsolved. The violence is crazy considering how tiny the country is, and its urban area is mostly confined to a 10-mile stretch of the east coast.

You have to assume, at this point, that the mafia is tightly intertwined with local politics.

[1] http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2016-11-01/local-news...

I'm not exactly a paranoid conspiracy theorist,

I think we can very safely just drop the term "conspiracy theorist", from now on. There can be very little doubt that "jobs" of this nature are not just approved, but very carefully considered and approved at the highest levels. The questions to be investigated are which organizations were responsible, which individuals were involved and how they operate, exactly.

Headline is a little misleading. She had nothing to do with the release of the Panama Papers. She read them once they were posted online, looking to see if there were people of interest to her community, and blogging about that.

I didn't read the headline (perhaps it has mutated since) as indicating that she was involved in the release of the Panama Papers, per say - just that she was a journalist who wrote about them.

She's a journalist whose reporting on the Panama Papers led to significant impact in Malta:

http://www.politico.eu/list/politico-28-class-of-2017-rankin...

> The best way to think of Daphne Caruana Galizia is as a one-woman WikiLeaks, crusading against untransparency and corruption in Malta, an island nation famous for both...“She single-handedly brought the government to the verge of collapse,” says one MP.*

If it were straightforward to report on Malta in the Panama Papers, the original investigation would have targeted Malta's government. A lot of important journalism is examining released material and connecting the dots within a context.

Sure, I was not saying anything one way or another about her impact. The headline just made it sound like it was the person who broke the Panama Papers story. Or maybe it was just me who read it that way.

And I thought movies exaggerated. I hate it when reality overcomes fiction.

One interesting statement from the article: Muscat announced later in parliament that FBI officers were on their way to Malta to assist with the investigation, following his request for outside help from the US government.

It's interesting that the prime minister of Malta has asked the US FBI for help. The EU is a "federation" of sorts and could (perhaps already does?) have their own EU-wide equivalent of our USA-wide FBI?

The FBI is quite often useful in US cases like this. It can act as an independent agency that can and does investigate local corruption. But it seems inappropriate to have them investigate a murder in Malta? Isn't there a lot of "local knowledge" that the FBI wouldn't have?

There are other nuances involved in the USA. Local murders aren't, without other circumstances, "federal" crimes. So the FBI doesn't generally get involved. But there are other laws available here for situations like this. E.g. it is a US federal offense to violate someone's "civil rights".

There is a precedent to this. BCCI(registered in Luxembourg) was taken down by US Customs.

They can also decline to fully cooperate with the FBI later on, if it gets too close. Right now it's great: who doesn't trust the FBI...we have nothing to hide, call them in to find the truth. In reality, unless local police guide and allow them, they can do jack.

Maltese person here who has been following this journalist for a long time. The international reporting of this omits a lot of important information. It is far from certain that her assassination had a political motive. While I admired her for uncovering cases of corruption, she also had a very nasty streak, resorting to things like publishing revenge porn [1][2] and mocking women for the way the dressed [3]. A revenge motive completely unconnected to politics cannot be excluded.

I don't deny that the circumstances of the assassination are suspicious, and I also think a political motive is possible, but people are jumping to conclusions without waiting for evidence.

[1](https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2013/08/oh-look-whos-here-m...)

[2](https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2015/09/bottom-of-the-barre...)

[3](https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2016/09/hot-new-style-wroug...)

Darkly humorous that it's hard to figure out whether her car was trapped, or whether someone used a separate vehicular bomb and caught her in the blast radius.

The idea that this is a thing that the general public might routinely have to distinguish is pretty sad.

You can make up your mind of what kind of person she was by reading her blog:

https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/

She was hated by many, both because she was very biased (think more Breitbart than Fox News) and also because she had no reservations about punching below the belt. It is hard to write this without sounding biased, but I never thought of her as a good person nor as a good journalist.

The perpetrator could be anyone, but personally I do not think it was politically motivated since she supported a faction of the opposition that is currently, completely in shambles and she was therefore no threat to anyone. Moreover, most of the Maltese population did not respect her as a journalist because of her overt bias. All the people jumping to conclusions are just doing a disservice to her by possibly misleading the investigations.

There is also no reason to believe that she was killed by some "international bankers" or some such conspiracy theories. Her "investigative journalism" was limited to attacking the PL, one of our two main political parties. She never really ventured past that.

I will not speculate further.

Car bombs just plant themselves now?

I did not deny that she was murdered. I just said that there is no reason to believe that this was a politically motivated murder when it would make no sense at all at this point in time.

Keep in mind that we may not be in possession of all the facts about what she was working on or whom she was in contact with. Usually, during the course of an investigation and before publication, a reporter will have made contact with and presented evidence to the target of the investigation. Even if she weren't actually working on an investigation, her murderers may have perceived her to be an ongoing danger.

Yes, it's possible that she was just a random victim. Reminds me of the subplot in "The Wire" in which an politically important homicide victim is found later to have died of an accident. But I'm guessing random accidental shootings happen more in Baltimore than planted car bombs in Malta.

> Her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the vehicle into several pieces and threw the debris into a nearby field.

> A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers, Caruana Galizia was recently described by the Politico website as a “one-woman WikiLeaks”. Her blogs were a thorn in the side of both the establishment and underworld figures that hold sway in Europe’s smallest member state.

The article contradicts pretty much everything you just said.

Her blog was popular. I read it too. Not because I agreed with her. Go read the blog, yourself to see what kind of person she was.

Most people hated her because she was mean and her pastime, when not professionally attacking politicians on the other side of the aisle, was to dig up dirt on their spouses and acquaintances and attacking them on a personal level. [5]

For example of the kind of shit that she would engage in: Here she is reposting revenge porn. The victim is an acquaintance of some random major of some random town that leans towards the other political party. The major did nothing wrong nor was she politically relevant in anyway. This was her bread and butter "journalism". [1]

With regards to the car bomb, I'm not sure what you are saying here. I am not denying that she was murdered using a car bomb. Are you saying that this implies a high level actor? Far from it. Low level thugs and organized crime members kill each other with car bomb frequently. [2] [3] [4]

One last thing. With regards to the whole Panama thing, that was potentially her only work that could be see as real journalism. But also that situation is being misrepresented. The entire picture is more complicated. The thing is that she was part of a faction of the opposition who had previously been in power for 25 years and where themselves corrupt. So much so that despite the whole Panama scandal thing, the recent election saw the newly in power PL government widen the gap by a very huge margin of 40000 votes out of a few hundred thousand. Basically the statement by the electorate was, "we do not care that the PL are corrupt, you guys were equally corrupt and for much longer, at least the PL as improving things elsewhere". This resulted in the her party basically disintegrating and is currently fragmented and disorganized. This is why I said that a political motive does not make sense. Because there is no reason for it. The electorate wants the PL to lead the country for a few more years despite the corruption because they are so fed up with the PN.

[1] NSFW Link: https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2015/09/bottom-of-the-barre...

[2] https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20160116/local/ma...

[3] https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20121003/local/Po...

[4] https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20130607/world/bo...

[5] There were reports of people celebrating her death at the university and elsewhere. That's how much they hated her.

This is one of the most insightful comments here. Not sure why it's being downvoted?

Your links below certainly seem to support what you are saying.

It seems unfair to me that you are being downvoted. I am a Maltese developer and my thoughts mirror yours. The international media has taken a slant on this (assuming that her murder is connected to the Panama Papers) which may turn out to be correct but is far from certain.

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