Valletta: Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese investigative journalist who exposed her country's link to the Panama Papers, was killed on Monday when a powerful bomb blew up her car, police said, in a case that stunned the small Mediterranean island.

Galizia, 53, ran a hugely popular blog in which she relentlessly highlighted cases of alleged high-level corruption targeting politicians from across party lines.

"There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate," she wrote in a blog post published on her site just half an hour before an explosion tore into her car.

Locals said Galizia had just left her house and was on a road near the village of Bidnija in northern Malta when the bomb detonated, sending her car flying into an adjacent field.