A Malta Jury Acquitted Yorgen Fenech Nine Years After Daphne Caruana Galizia Was Blown Up
Prosecutors said the businessman ordered and paid for the 2017 car bomb that killed Malta's best-known investigative journalist. The jury found him not guilty on both counts.
A jury in Valletta acquitted Maltese businessman Yorgen Fenech on Wednesday of complicity and criminal conspiracy in the 2017 car bombing that killed investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, ending the last of the prosecutions brought in a case that toppled a prime minister and became Europe's most closely watched test of whether a small state would punish the killing of a reporter.
Fenech was indicted in 2021. Prosecutors accused him of masterminding the assassination and of having ordered and paid for it. He pleaded not guilty and the jury found for him on both counts. He walked out of the courtroom into a chaotic scene, hecklers shouting as he got into a waiting car, and said nothing. No cameras are allowed inside Maltese criminal trials.
Caruana Galizia was 53 when a bomb detonated in her car near her home on Oct. 16, 2017. She had spent years writing about suspected corruption among Malta's political and business elite, including figures in then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat's inner circle whom she accused of holding offshore companies exposed in the Panama Papers leak. She also went after opposition politicians and business leaders. At the time she was killed, she was facing more than 40 libel suits.
Fenech was part of a consortium that won a contested government contract to build a power station in Malta. His arrest in 2019, taken off his yacht as he sailed away from the island, set off mass protests that ended with Muscat's resignation. A public inquiry published in 2021 concluded that the Maltese state "has to bear responsibility" for the assassination because of a culture of impunity running from the top of government.
Other prosecutions in the case did produce convictions. Brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio pleaded guilty in 2022 to carrying out the bombing and were sentenced to 40 years each. In 2025, Jamie Vella and Robert Agius were sentenced to life, the maximum available, for complicity — prosecutors said they supplied the bomb. Vincent Muscat pleaded guilty in 2021 and got 15 years. The self-described middleman, taxi driver Melvin Theuma, received a presidential pardon in 2019 in exchange for his testimony.
Caruana Galizia's sons sat in the courtroom for the verdict and left without speaking. The family later posted a statement to Facebook saying the outcome denied her the "justice she deserves." "Nine years after Daphne's brutal assassination, the institutional failures that enabled her murder remain unaddressed and unreformed," it read. "Lasting justice means no person should ever face the same risks again. Our country failed to protect Daphne. It owes it to her to prevent other lives being lost."
Originally reported by NPR.