Hacker News Reader

Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com