The Committee to Protect Journalists joined eight other international press freedom organizations today in a statement welcoming an announcement that the Maltese government and the family of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia have agreed on the membership of the board appointed to investigate the circumstances of Caruana Galizia’s 2017 killing, and on the investigation’s scope.
Caruana Galizia, a prominent investigative journalist and blogger who reported on the Panama Papers and alleged corruption, was killed on October 16, 2017, when the car that she was driving exploded near her house in Bidnija, in northern Malta, according to CPJ research. Three individuals have been jailed for the killing, but no trial date has been announced and no masterminds of the killing have been identified, according to that research.
CPJ and other signatories of the statement, led by Article 19, have repeatedly called for an independent, impartial, and effective public inquiry into the journalist’s killing. In September 2019, the Maltese government announced the launch of the public inquiry, nearly three months after the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had expressed concerns over the official investigation into the murder and passed a resolution calling for a public inquiry, as CPJ reported at the time.
The full statement can be read here.