Bomb was ‘organic explosive’ detonated via mobile phone message, police inspector tells pre-trial hearing for three suspects over killing of journalist

A court in Malta has heard that the powerful car bomb used to kill the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was detonated by a mobile phone signal sent from a boat off the island’s coast as part of a carefully planned operation lasting several months.

Police inspector Keith Arnaud told a pre-trial hearing that evidence against the three suspects, brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio and Vince Muscat, all well-known to the police, centred mainly on telephone intercepts.

The three pleaded not guilty when they were charged earlier this month with the journalist’s murder as well as with the criminal use of explosives, involvement in organised crime, and criminal conspiracy.

Caruana Galizia, whose popular blog attacked high-level political corruption, shady business dealings and organised crime on the island, died instantly when the huge car bomb exploded minutes after she left her home on 16 October.

Her murder sent shockwaves through Malta and alarmed the EU, which had already expressed concerns about rule of law on the island. The bloc’s smallest member state has long been labelled a safe haven for shady foreign money.

Arnaud said forensic testing had determined that the bomb was an “organic explosive” detonated using a circuit board fitted with a sim card and triggered by a mobile phone message.



Helped by Dutch experts and experts from the FBI, Maltese detectives had collected and examined around 25 hours of CCTV footage from every home and building in the vicinity of Caruana Galizia’s family home in the hamlet of Bidnija, he said.

“It was clear to us that whoever carried out this crime had probably shadowed the victim very closely,” Arnaud said, since Caruana Galizia’s movements were unpredictable and the journalist followed no set routine.

The inspector said in the hours after the bombing he had identified several possible vantage points from which the house could have been clearly observed, including one where part of a brick wall had recently collapsed.

Neighbours reported seeing a “small white car” parked at the spot before and on the day of the killing, he said, and detectives had recovered forensic evidence from the scene including a “fresh-looking” cigarette butt.

Analysis of mobile phone activity in the area on the day of Caruana Galizia’s death led police to focus on one particular sim card that had “lost contact with a tower at precisely the same moment it received it – 2.59pm,” the time of the explosion.

The sim card had been contacted by a mobile phone located at sea by triangulation data, Arnaud said. Both numbers had been activated in November last year and had exchanged just four text messages – including the one that detonated the bomb.

The mobile phone of one of the three suspects, George Degiorgio, was already under surveillance, the inspector said, and had been used – from the same location out at sea – to request a credit top-up to the sim card of the phone that sent the fatal text message.

Both George and Alfred Degiorgio owned pleasure boats, Arnaud said. One, the Maya, was recorded on CCTV camera leaving Malta’s Grand Harbour at 8am on the morning of Caruana Galizia’s killing and not seen returning until after 3pm.

After two magistrates earlier recused themselves following objections from defence lawyers, judge Claire Stafrace Zammit dismissed a request that she, too, abstain as “frivolous and vexatious” and ruled that the hearing – which will determine if the case goes to trial – must continue.



MEPs visiting Malta on a fact-finding mission earlier this month said they had arrived “seriously concerned” about the rule of law and were leaving “even more worried”. They said an apparent reluctance to investigate and prosecute major cases had created a “perception of impunity”.



The journalist’s family are taking legal action against the island’s police, saying the investigation into the killing cannot be impartial and independent since Caruana Galizia wrote critical articles about both the senior officer now running it, Silvio Valletta, and his wife, a top government minister.

