The car bomb that killed the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia on Monday did not go off in Honduras, Afghanistan or any other country where one might expect to hear about brutal violence against reporters. The device exploded in the early afternoon down the road from her home in the tiny European nation of Malta, where, for the greater part of the last decade, the 53-year-old had held some of the most powerful people in the country accountable for political corruption, offshore financial dealings and abuse of power.

It’s still unclear who was behind her death, which Maltese politicians from all parties widely denounced as a murder. It’s also baffling as to why the local police were not keeping a closer eye on her, given that she’d apparently reported threats just two weeks before.

What’s certain, though, is that in addition to erasing a life, a wife, a mother of three and a small country’s most popular blogger, the bomb dispensed with the idea that journalists working in developed European democracies are immune to — or even protected from — fatal repercussions for their work.

Last month, the dismembered head, limbs and torso of Kim Wall, a Swedish writer profiling a D.I.Y. submarine enthusiast in Denmark, were found off the coast of Copenhagen. Over the past year, Turkey, which was once at least nominally democratic, has imprisoned more than 100 journalists without trial. Poland’s ruling party has seized control of public radio and TV programming, all but ending their editorial independence. Even broadcast journalists in Finland — a country that has consistently ranked at the top of global press freedom lists — have been pressured by their prime minister not to publish reports about his conflicts of interest in business.