Audio recordings of police interrogations played to a Maltese jury this week revealed that Yorgen Fenech, the businessman on trial for the 2017 car bomb assassination of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, pointed the finger at the highest levels of government at the time, claiming the murder was commissioned by the former prime minister’s chief of staff.
Caruana Galizia, 53, who spent years reporting on corruption at the top of the Maltese state, was killed by a car bomb in October 2017.
In police interviews recorded in November 2019, he told investigators that Keith Schembri, then chief of staff to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, had pressed him for years to arrange the murder. Fenech said that the more than 450,000 euros he subsequently paid to the confessed middleman Melvin Theuma was not a murder fee, but money extorted from him through blackmail.
«Everything started with Keith Schembri,» Fenech told Superintendent Kurt Zahra during the interrogation. «I was commissioned by Keith Schembri. He was pushing for this murder. I was never the one who sent anyone or did anything.»
The interrogation tapes add a new twist to a trial already defined by secret recordings taped on a dictaphone hidden in a sock by Theuma, the state’s crown witness.
Theuma, a taxi driver and confessed middleman who received a presidential pardon in exchange for his cooperation, previously testified that Fenech hired him in 2017 to organize the hit for 150,000 euro, working through hitmen George and Alfed Degiorgio and Vince Muscat — all of whom have already pleaded guilty.
He secretly recorded his conversations with Fenech and played those tapes last week in the courtroom. Theuma claimed that Fenech checked on the plot every four days and handed him envelopes with 50 euro notes.
In his 2019 police interviews, however, Fenech presented a vastly different account, portraying himself as a pawn caught between Schembri and Theuma.
He claimed Schembri had been urging him to find someone to kill the journalist since 2014, once even paying someone 30,000 euro for a plot that fell through. When police asked why Fenech never named Schembri during his secretly taped conversations with Theuma, Fenech said he was protecting his friend.
«Keith Schembri was like my brother. I protected him from Melvin Theuma, and those tapes confirm that,» he said. That changed, he explained, when Schembri called him and assured him of a pardon, which he never received.
The hundreds of thousands of euros handed to Theuma after the hitmen were arrested in December 2017, Fenech described as extortion money.
«Melvin was blackmailing me because he recorded me. He threatened me,» he said. He claimed Theuma once produced a gun, and once appeared near where his children are collected from school.
Fenech also alleged that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat became aware of the plot after the assassination, claiming Muscat discussed an upcoming police raid on Theuma during a birthday party at the prime minister’s summer residence.
«I am not saying that the prime minister knew beforehand. I am saying that the prime minister knew afterwards,» he said.
Both Schembri and Muscat have repeatedly denied involvement in or prior knowledge of the assassination.
Superintendent Zahra testified that police analysis of phone records contradicted Fenech’s timeline and noted that Fenech continued using Theuma as a family driver throughout the period he claimed to be under threat.
The police tapes represent the latest evidence presented in a trial that has laid bare a web of contract hitmen, cash payoffs, and high-level leaks from inside the Maltese government. Fenech has pleaded not guilty to complicity in the murder, and his defense team is set to resume cross-examination as the trial continues.
