Daphne Caruana Galizia
A one-woman newsroom who exposed corruption at the top of Maltese politics and was killed by a car bomb
Daphne Vella was born in Sliema and first came to the attention of the police at nineteen, when she was arrested and held for two days after an anti-government protest in 1984. She began writing for the Sunday Times of Malta in 1987, and over the following decades became the country's best-known columnist, with a style that was sharp, personal and unsparing about the small island's political families. In 2008 she started a blog, Running Commentary, which on some days had more readers than the entire Maltese press.
In 2016 the Panama Papers confirmed what she had already begun reporting: that a government minister and the prime minister's chief of staff had set up secret companies in Panama shortly after taking office. She pursued the story relentlessly, along with the licensing of a private bank in Valletta and the sale of Maltese passports. She also made claims that were never proved, including that a third Panama company belonged to the prime minister's wife, which a later inquiry rejected. Her critics, and there were many, called her a hate blogger. At the time of her death she faced 47 libel suits, her family dog had been killed, and her house had been set on fire.
On 16 October 2017, minutes after posting a final entry that ended with the words above, she drove away from her home in Bidnija and a bomb under the driver's seat exploded. Her son Matthew ran to the field where the car was burning.
Three men were convicted of planting the bomb, and a businessman awaits trial for commissioning it. The prime minister resigned in 2020, and a public inquiry found in 2021 that the state had created a climate of impunity that led to her death.