VALLETTA, Sept. 3 — A Maltese jury acquitted businessman Yorgen Fenech on Wednesday of orchestrating the 2017 car-bomb murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, clearing the last suspect charged in a killing that shocked Europe, toppled a prime minister and exposed a culture of impunity on the Mediterranean island nation, the European Union’s smallest.
Fenech, a prominent Maltese businessman who was indicted in 2021 on charges of complicity and criminal conspiracy, pleaded not guilty. The jury found him not guilty on both counts by an 8-to-1 margin after roughly eight hours of deliberation. He walked out of the Valletta courtroom to a chaotic scene, with hecklers shouting as he climbed into a waiting car, and made no comment. Cameras were barred from the courtroom, as is typical in Maltese criminal trials.
Caruana Galizia, 53, was killed on Oct. 16, 2017, when a car bomb was detonated while she was driving near her home. Her investigative reports had targeted people in then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s inner circle whom she accused of keeping offshore companies in tax havens disclosed in the Panama Papers, as well as figures in Malta’s opposition and business circles. At the time of her death she was facing more than 40 libel suits.
Her killing triggered mass protests and an independent inquiry, which concluded in 2021 that the Maltese state “has to bear responsibility” for the assassination due to a culture of impunity that emanated from the highest levels of government. Fenech had been involved in a consortium that won a controversial government contract to build a power station; his arrest in 2019, as he was sailing away from Malta on his yacht, sparked demonstrations that culminated in Muscat’s resignation.
Fenech was the last of a half-dozen people charged in the plot to be prosecuted. George Degiorgio and his brother Alfred Degiorgio pleaded guilty in 2022 to carrying out the slaying and were each sentenced to 40 years in prison. In 2025, Jamie Vella and Robert Agius, accused of supplying the bomb, were sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of complicity in the murder. Vincent Muscat pleaded guilty in 2021 for his role and received 15 years, while a self-confessed middleman, taxi driver Melvin Theuma, was granted a presidential pardon in 2019 in exchange for testimony.
Caruana Galizia’s sons were in the courtroom when the verdict was read and left without commenting. In a statement posted on Facebook, the family said the verdict denied the journalist “the justice she deserves.” “Nine years after Daphne’s brutal assassination, the institutional failures that enabled her murder remain unaddressed and unreformed,” the statement said. “Our country failed to protect Daphne. It owes it to her to prevent other lives being lost.”