‘I knew it was a car bomb straight away’: the day my mother Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered
It was around 2pm in London. I was at a friend’s house in the west of the city. We had just finished lunch and made coffee when my phone began to ring relentlessly with a Maltese number that I did not recognise. The caller was so insistent that it disturbed me. If there was an emergency in Malta, where the rest of my family still lived, I would have been called from a number I recognised.
I copied the number and sent it to my mother on WhatsApp, asking whether she knew it. I noticed that the message I sent received one grey tick, meaning it hadn’t been delivered. A message from a friend in Malta, an emergency doctor, came in: “Everything OK?”
“Hurricane Ophelia?” I replied, referring to the storm that had started in the Azores and was now threatening London. “Yes, fine.”
As I sat down with my coffee, my girlfriend Jessica rang. “Paul, Cora just called me,” she said, referring to my aunt. “She said that Matthew’s been trying to get through to you.”
I hung up and the Maltese number called again. I walked into another room, sat down on a sofa and answered. It was Matthew.
“Paul,” he said, “there was a bomb in her car.”
And then, with each word separated by what felt like an eternity, he added, “I don’t think she made it.”
I felt my mind lift to the room’s ceiling, so that I was looking back at myself, sitting on a sofa at a friend’s house, listening to my brother tell me that our mother had just been assassinated.
“Paul?” he said.
“What do I do, Matt? What do I do?”
“Come home. Now,” he said. “Get on the next flight to Malta.”
Outside, the sun was the colour of blood and the sky purple. Hurricane Ophelia was blowing Saharan dust into the city, scattering the sunlight differently. Purple was my mother’s favourite colour. Ophelia, who in Hamlet didn’t realise the danger she was in until her “muddy death”, brought it to me.
My mother’s speech was not as forceful as her writing. It had something of the up-and-down Maltese cadence, but it was gentler than was typical, and it came with more pauses, some to think and others to let sources talk. There was a shyness about her that meant she always felt more comfortable expressing herself in writing than out loud. I have a trace of that shyness, too, and it reminds me how driven she was to do her work. “I love it,” she told an interviewer 10 days before her murder. “It’s a compulsion to write.”
As she wrote, so she gazed: with intensity. When I lied to her about coming home late, or not at all, I felt myself wilt in her eyes as she listened.
My mother taught me, Matthew and my other brother, Andrew, to read widely, to think and speak freely, to care. To care for one another, our friends, family, all our dogs, our guinea pigs, our hamsters, an qaqoċċa (artichoke) – a Maltese image of solidarity. Sometimes we managed. Sometimes we used the manners she taught us, and which she was rigid about: to show more of an interest in others than yourself, to be interesting and to hold doors open, to know when to say this and when to wear that. The rules were not novel. They were the rules of decorum of any middle-class household. In fact, they seem like a relic, a part of old Malta that she held on to.
“She always hated coarseness and people being frivolous,” her first love told me. “Your mother could be aloof, haughty and proud.”
She didn’t marry that first love. Instead, she married my father, had us three boys with him, and moved us to the countryside. Up to that point, her life seemed conventional. The rules and manners, marriage and children. But when early on in her domestic life she felt suffocated, she began to write. No longer only in the diaries she kept constantly by her side, or scraps for trade publications, but more professionally. She took a part-time job as an editorial assistant on a quarterly magazine shortly before I was born. My father put down her profession on my birth certificate as “Housewife and Editor”, and his own as “Advocate”.
During our naps and stays with grandparents and aunts, she edited copy that she always told her boss was poorly written and boring, and needed rewriting. Soon she began writing herself, and her writing quickly got her noticed. In 1990, the Sunday Times of Malta offered her a column. She became the country’s first female columnist, and the first journalist to write under their own name; all of the others wrote anonymously, out of fear of reprisals. Two years later, she helped launch a newspaper.
Almost immediately, she began to criticise Maltese society. The values she insisted on at home were no different from those she found lacking in her country. Why should there be, for example, a distinction between a prime minister’s personal and public behaviour? “You vote for the whole person,” she wrote. “It’s not an office job.” She criticised what politicians wore, their posture, the way they spoke. She reviled the Catholicism in everything, the misogyny, the pollution and overdevelopment. In time, as the country’s problems changed, she would investigate drug traffickers, neo-Nazis, presidents, prime ministers and opposition leaders. She would pioneer financial journalism when Malta became an offshore haven, turning leaks such as the Panama Papers into dramas that kept a population in suspense.
In a country of around half a million people, her personal blog received as many visits a day, and more than a million during election campaigns – a greater number than the combined circulation of Malta’s daily newspapers.
Everyone read Daphne; our surname was redundant. Our first names were redundant. My father was known as Daphne’s Husband; my brothers and I as Daphne’s Sons. Interest in our lives began to overshadow her work. She resented it. She refused media appearances, saying that things in Malta were so depressing, so predictably rotten, that she was what passed for a celebrity there.
And the retaliation for her writing came. My brothers and I grew up thinking it normal to have our mother’s name all over the newspapers and broadcast media, for politicians to sue and slander her, to have our house set on fire, to have police at the garden gate to guard or arrest her, to answer the home phone and hear obscenities about her, to find parcels of human excrement in the post and to see her check the underside of her car for bombs before taking us to school.
As a boy, I used to wonder why my friends’ mothers were so different from mine. As a young teenager, I resented the difference. I sometimes felt our lives might be easier if she wasn’t a journalist. It was only at the end of my adolescence that I began to see there was a problem in Malta, and the problem was not my mother.
The day my mother died was a busy one. Matthew and my mother struggled to keep up with a leak of thousands of documents and emails from a company called ElectroGas, which was given a monopoly over Malta’s energy supply by the prime minister, Joseph Muscat. My mother had spent the past four years investigating corruption allegations surrounding Muscat’s administration. She was working with Matthew at home by the dining room’s east-facing window.
Opposite the window, the large bougainvillea bled crimson paper petals to the ground. The sun had moved along its circuit and now hung above, casting them into sharp relief. They had not eaten any breakfast. Lunchtime came and went.
At about 2pm, my mother pulled herself away from her laptop by the dining room window. She went to the kitchen and returned with a plate of tomatoes and mozzarella, seasoned and covered in olive oil. She placed it before Matthew.
At 2.35pm she uploaded a blog post. It was about Keith Schembri, Muscat’s chief of staff, who was testifying in a libel suit he had filed against the former leader of the opposition Nationalist party. The leader had criticised him during his speech at the protests triggered by my mother’s first Panama Papers blog posts. “I swear on the cross that I am innocent,” Schembri had said on the stand.
“There are crooks everywhere you look now,” my mother wrote. “The situation is desperate.”
Her bank called. It was about regaining access to her money, which had been frozen by the economy minister, Chris Cardona, and his aide as part of libel proceedings they had filed against her. The bank told my mother she was late for an appointment and must come now.
“OK,” she told Matthew after hanging up, “I have to go.”
She grabbed her bag and walked out of the front door, but moments later – precisely 44 seconds later – she came back inside.
“Forgot my chequebook,” she explained, picking it up off the shelf right by the front door. “OK, now I’m really going. Bye, Matt.”
She slammed the front door behind her. The keys and evil eye amulet hanging from the lock jangled.
An elderly farmer who knew my parents was driving up the Bidnija road. He saw my mother coming the other way in her grey Peugeot.
“She must have felt something,” he said, “because she stopped.”
He saw her pull up on the handbrake. White smoke began to emerge from her car. There was a bang and a flash.
“It was a small one,” he said. “It was like a spark. Some debris was blown away from it and I saw her. I even heard her scream. A big scream.”
She screamed for around five seconds, then her petrol tank ignited.
The second explosion sent the Peugeot, with her inside it, shooting towards his car. It just missed him. The car landed in a field 50 metres from where he had seen her stop. He stepped out of his car and saw my mother “was literally in pieces”. He froze, and could not turn away, until he realised he had to stop oncoming traffic from running over her remains.
The noise of the explosion shook the windows of our house. “I knew it was a car bomb straight away,” Matthew said. “It couldn’t have been anything else.” Barefoot, he ran to the front door and opened it to blinding sunlight. The dogs had gone wild. He felt the blood drain from his face and thought he might faint.
But he ran to the gate. He started down the white-gravel lane. Looking towards the Bidnija road, he saw, about 250 metres from the house, “a tower of big black bubbling smoke. The kind you get when a pile of tyres is burning.” And in that moment, he thought: my God, this is it.
He sprinted down the road and when he got to the point where it dipped, he saw that the asphalt itself was on fire. He was confused. He could see metal debris around him, but no car on the road. Then, in the neighbouring field, he saw a “fireball”.
He ran to it. For a moment, the burning car looked white, not grey. “OK,” he thought. “It’s not her.” But as he moved around the car he recognised the first three letters – QQZ – of its numberplate.
The car horn blaring, toxic smoke filling his lungs, the heat from the blaze burning his face, he started running round the car, trying to find a way to open a door. Narrowing his eyes to look through the smoke and flames, he could not see anything inside, not even a silhouette. “There was nothing I could do,” he recalled. “I’ve never felt so helpless in my life.”
He could hear the whine of police sirens in the distance, coming closer. A single police car arrived with two young officers. They stopped beside Matthew. They were in a panic, fumbling around with a single fire extinguisher.
One of them sprayed the blaze but then dropped the extinguisher. Matthew screamed and tried to grab it. The other officer burst into tears. “Sorry,” the officer said. “There is nothing we can do.”
Matthew looked around. He realised he was surrounded by our mother’s body parts. He knew the officer was right.
“Who is in the car?” the officer asked.
“My mother,” Matthew said.
Matthew met me and Jessica at the airport in a dark lounge suit. He explained that he had gone to court to ask the duty magistrate charged with the inquest, Consuelo Herrera, to recuse herself on the grounds that she had filed criminal libel proceedings against my mother. Five hours on, she had not given them a decision. We said little else. We cried into one another’s shoulders and went outside, where my father was waiting in the car, and headed home. As we approached Bidnija, my father warned me of what to expect: a scene full of police officers and soldiers, lit with bright white floodlights.
Forensic officers guided us down the grassy middle of the white-gravel lane so as not to disturb any potential tracks to the house. It was warm and the air was still. In the garden, our dogs kept quiet.
I dumped my bag by the front door, and for a moment expected to hear the sound of my mother typing. We sat at the kitchen table and waited for the homicide inspectors to come. When the two police officers arrived, we moved to the living room. They asked about our whereabouts and for our phone numbers, in order to start tracking down calls made in the area that day.
When I looked around, I saw we were all lost. Matthew was running on adrenaline. He went through the details of the day. He told the police officers that whoever had triggered the bomb must have used the Tarġa Battery, the old British artillery battery facing Bidnija Hill, as a lookout. The gun post provided a direct line of sight into the dining room through its east-facing window.
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“We’re already on it,” one told him.
The homicide officers said the police had called in Europol agents and the Netherlands Forensic Institute to help. A counter-terrorism police officer had thought to call the FBI to help analyse cellphone data in the area, which was an unusual procedure for a murder in Malta, where the police force didn’t have the technical capability to sift through and trace such data and so previous car bombings went unsolved. They left. Night passed; dawn came.
Matthew published a Facebook post in which he described Malta as “a mafia state”. The Maltese had never thought of themselves in this way, and some responded by saying he was just overwrought. The government’s supporters said he was damaging the country’s reputation.
We heard drones flying overhead. Police officers marched around our garden. Forensic officers in white suits combed through the fields around the house. A group of journalists gathered at the end of the lane, waiting for us to emerge. Phone calls, a never-ending stream, came in.
One was from our lawyers. Seventeen hours after they had asked for Herrera’s recusal, she had agreed to step away, decreeing that justice needed to be done and seen to be done, and the case was transferred to another magistrate.
With this news, I tried convincing Matthew to eat. He was refusing to, feeling that it would mark an acceptance of our mother’s death; that by not eating he was holding time. I said we needed to eat to carry on. My father busied himself in the kitchen. We ate and walked outside to the front of the house, where Matthew showed us the indigenous saplings my mother had bought the day before she was murdered. A large old pinewood table was blanketed with them. Matthew told us she had wanted to plant a Maltese garden. The saplings, just leaves attached to twigs, were small, vulnerable things. But what promise they held. A mighty holm oak. A tough bay laurel. A towering Aleppo pine. I could not bear to look at them. We went back inside.
Cora came to the house to help with the flood of media requests. Reporters kept asking us whether my mother’s murder was related to her work on the criminal gangs who smuggle fuel out of Libya, using Malta as a base. We could not understand the questions. Aside from a few passing mentions on her blog, my mother had never investigated them. We wrote and sent out a fact sheet about her. It moved from her early opinion columns to, as Malta’s institutions were “systematically taken down” and the country welcomed “volumes of illicit financial flows”, her reporting on “the links between Maltese politics and the country’s criminal underworld”. We asked journalists to focus on the real subject of her investigations: government corruption.
Muscat, the prime minister, appeared on television, smirking, saying he would “leave no stone unturned” in bringing the perpetrators to justice. Through various intermediaries, including the president, he asked us to endorse a €1m reward for information on the assassination.
There was no need for us to endorse it other than to show we were on the same side as him. We heard he wanted to announce the reward at a scheduled meeting in Brussels three days after the murder.
Before he landed there, my brothers and I uploaded a joint Facebook post. It was our first public intervention and would set the tone for all that would follow. We wrote: “The government is interested in only one thing: its reputation and the need to hide the gaping hole where our institutions once were. This interest is not ours. Neither was it our mother’s.” Before signing off with, “We are not interested in justice without change”, we called for the resignations of Muscat, the attorney general and the police commissioner, who all denied wrongdoing.
The coroner called my father. He explained that identification, so far, was circumstantial. My mother was unrecognisable. Forensic officers investigating the explosion found that her car was completely burnt down. The bomb contained the equivalent of 300-400 grams of TNT, enough to ensure death for the person in the driver’s seat and capable of rupturing eardrums in the surrounding area. The forensic officers examining my mother found most of her burnt body was still in the car. The officers considered using an adhesive to reassemble her head but found it too fragmented. It had begun falling apart in a doctor’s hands at the scene.
Her right leg and left foot were missing. The officers found them on the road. By the left front wheel, they found part of her right hand and a fragment of bone, both heavily burned.
The coroner told my father that he needed a DNA sample from my brothers or me to match with her remains.
My father said he would bring the three of us to the morgue. We were scared to get in a car. My father pleaded with us. “It’s a 20-minute drive,” he said. “Boys, please.” It was the first time since her death that we had left the house together. Matthew sat in the front passenger seat. I sat in the back with Andrew and held on to his arm.
When we arrived at the morgue, we did not know what to do with the car. We did not want to leave it unattended. The bombing had pushed us into a world where anything was possible. We left it near a car park attendant and agreed to check its underside and seats for devices when we returned.
Inside, a plainclothes officer guided us to the coroner’s office. We were late, but the coroner was not there. We waited for him in silence. He barged in, shook my father’s hand, and made small talk about knowing one of my father’s cousins.
Matthew said, “I’m sorry, this is totally inappropriate.”
The coroner and my father looked embarrassed.
“Matt,” my father pleaded. “Please.”
“No, enough,” Matthew replied. “It’s not the time for small talk.”
The coroner lowered his head and explained he needed to take a swab of saliva from one of our mouths.
“Is this really necessary?” my father asked. “She had pre-existing fractures in her left arm and right ankle. Can’t you use those?”
“Yes, friend,” the coroner said, “but there are a lot of fractures.”
Matthew was still agitated, and Andrew was trying to support my father, so I told the coroner he could take the swab from me. I signed a document and he took my photo. I glanced at it on the way out but looked away before the image of myself, wan and unshaven, could fix in my mind.
Outside, we checked the underside of my father’s car before returning to Bidnija.
Condolence letters and cards piled up in the house. One, a heavy envelope with a Roman postmark, addressed simply to “Matthew Caruana Galizia, Bidnija”, contained a card with a message of condolence, a black ribbon and a single leaf of bay laurel.
The bay laurel’s waxy leaves are hard to tear. The shrub evolved in an unkind Mediterranean environment. It anchors deep in arid soil and can withstand both dry heat and cold winters.
My father, who still found it difficult to speak to my brothers and me about our mother, saw us puzzle over the leaf. He sat down, cards and letters scattered around us, and for a few moments we were three boys again, listening to our father tell a story.
Daphne, he told us, pursued by the lovelorn Apollo, begged her father, a lesser god, for help. His solution was to turn her into a bay laurel. My father went to my mother’s books, pulled one off the shelf and opened it to a passage from Ovid: “A heavy numbness seized her limbs, thin bark closed over her breast, her hair turned into leaves, her arms into branches, her feet so swift a moment ago stuck fast in slow-growing roots, her face was lost in the canopy. Only her shining beauty was left.”
Apollo’s unrequited love for Daphne was now impossible. He broke twigs off the Daphne tree, as the Greeks call it, and made a wreath, which he wore on his head. He vowed that Daphne, like him, would have eternal youth. Her leaves would never wither and fall.
As my father talked, I looked out of the living room window at the bay laurel my parents had planted years earlier. Sunlight played on its leaves. It had grown tall, as tall as the old Aleppo pine near it. We went into the garden and cut off one of its branches. We sent some leaves from the branch to the activists, a group of women who called themselves Occupy Justice, who had begun camping outside Castille [the prime ministerial office] on the night of the murder. One of Muscat’s senior advisers called them prostitutes, adding, “I’m sure they will find someone to warm them up if they feel cold.”
We sent more leaves to the thousands of protesters who joined them, six days after the murder. They moved from near Castille to the parliament building, where they roared, “No change, no justice.”
Opposite parliament, another group of female activists called il-Kenniesa – the Sweepers – unfurled two white banners. They were splattered with red paint like bloodstains. The first read “MAFIA” and the second “STATE”. Police officers pulled them down. The activists put them back up and the crowd of protesters applauded and began marching down Valletta’s main street. They carried Maltese flags and placards emblazoned with my mother’s last published words: “There are crooks everywhere you look.” Many wore T-shirts with her face on them. They stopped at the courthouse and hung on its gates a large banner with “No Change, No Justice” written across the face of the police commissioner. I watched it all on the television at home in Bidnija. I recognised old school friends hanging the banner.
The day of her funeral was cloudless and warm; it seemed like an earthly indifference. Black suits, black ties, black hearts. We walked slowly from the cortege and into the church, behind my mother’s closed coffin. The hundreds of people gathered outside broke into applause, and the hundreds of people inside continued it, the sound echoing and re-echoing around the oversized dome until the coffin was laid in front of the altar.
Below it lay the flowers and wreaths people had sent. Spotting one labelled “Anġlu Farrugia” – a former police officer who had arrested my mother at a protest in 1984 before rising to be Muscat’s deputy and then speaker of Malta’s parliament – Matthew grabbed it from under the coffin, ripped up the label and kicked it away. The archbishop, with his mitre and swinging censer, and the dozen priests and former bishops pretended not to see as they took up their positions above the coffin.
Behind our extended family, I could hear the sound of weeping mixed with choral song. Our friends and our old teachers were there. There were farmers from Bidnija. There were former presidents and prime ministers, the chief justice and judges.
The archbishop directed some of his homily towards journalists: “Never grow weary in your mission to be the eyes, the ears and the mouth of the people.” And to the murderers: “However hard you try to evade the justice of men, you will never escape from the justice of God.”
He then turned to my brothers and me. “Your beloved mother died a cruel death by the hidden hand of someone who valued darkness over the light, for his actions are evil. See that you will always be the children of the light.”
I wondered how we could be children of the light in what felt like complete darkness.
Matthew and Andrew helped carry my mother’s coffin out of the church and into the hearse, while I walked alongside Jessica. The crowd began to clap again. The sound filled the square and then it stopped. In this wide-open space, with its main roads blocked to traffic and its shops and cafes closed, all that could be heard was the sound of my brothers’ footsteps as they moved slowly towards the hearse.
Then out of the silence came a man’s voice. “Justice! We want justice!” he shouted. As we drove away, I could see in the rear-view mirror people raising two fingers in a V, an allied symbol of democracy and victory, and I could hear them singing the national anthem.
“It was the first time,” my grandfather Michael told me, “that I felt Maltese.”
I flew back to London a few hours after the burial, leaving my brothers behind. In our garden, Jessica and I planted a bay laurel.