Despite her murderer's best efforts, she would not be silenced.

Upon a green and quiet hilltop sits the home of Daphne Caruana Galizia. We have come to speak with her son Matthew about the day his mother was murdered.

"It was just before 3pm, my mother needed to go to the bank," he explains to The Listening Post's Flo Phillips. "And that was the last time I saw her. The sound of the blast came very soon … I knew it was a bomb straight away. It's just the sound of it. It can't be anything else."

On the small and densely populated island of Malta, there is nowhere to hide from your enemies. Daphne Caruana Galizia had many - in high places. For 30 years, she had been Malta's most famous and most fearless journalist; described as a "one-woman WikiLeaks", her relentless investigation of financial corruption among Malta's political elite produced revelations that almost defied belief.

"This was Netflix material. We didn't even think it was possible for it to be real," says Mark Laurence Zammit, host of Xarabank, a long-running talk show - the most-watched in Malta. "Because it was so surreal at times, we thought this may have been all too big to be true. Maybe that's where some of us were wrong when we didn't really believe everything she said."

Caruana Galizia was used to her work being ignored - she was an independent journalist in a media landscape dominated by the same political parties her work exposed. But worse than being disbelieved, she suffered a lifetime of threats, abuse and harassment. In the years before her death, unknown assailants slit the throats of her family's pet dogs and attempted to set fire to their house.

Despite her murderer's best efforts, she would not be silenced.

"At one point, there was only one way of stopping Daphne Caruana Galizia from producing even more evidence," says Manuel Delia, "and that was killing her."

Delia is one of a team of journalists from around the world dedicated to continuing the work that Caruana Galizia was not able to finish. Among them, her son Matthew; as an investigative journalist himself, Matthew Caruana Galizia could not have imagined that one day, he would be investigating the murder of his own mother.

"What I realise now is that my mother was one step ahead of everyone," he tells us. "There will eventually come a time when there will be an opportunity for accountability. When that time comes, we will have to rely on the information that has been done by journalists like my mother."

Produced by: Flo Phillips and Ahmed Madi

Contributors:

Matthew Caruana Galizia - Son of Daphne Caruana Galizia and investigative journalist

Manuel Delia - Author, Murder on the Malta Express and blogger, Truth Be Told

Caroline Muscat - Founder, The Shift News and former news editor, The Times of Malta

Mark Laurence Zammit - Presenter, Xarabank

Source: Al Jazeera News