A recently-resurfaced video clip shows a former Labour Party minister perpetuating misinformation about political murders in Malta.
Joe Debono Grech, once a Labour minister in the 1980s and 1990s, was a guest on ‘Madwar Mejda’ (‘Around the Table’), a television programme on ONE, the station owned by Malta’s ruling Labour Party.
During the programme, Debono Grech declared that Malta only ever had one political murder. His statement is misleading at best.
The video clip (archived here) was shared on Facebook on 19th October 2024 by a page called ‘Ix-Xewka’ (‘The Thorn’), which appears to be dedicated to posting pro-Labour Party content. Posts shared by the official ‘Madwar Mejda’ page suggest that the programme actually aired in March 2023.
Debono Grech was referring to the death of Karin Grech, the fifteen-year-old girl killed in 1977 by a letter bomb addressed to her father, Edwin Grech.
Grech was a gynaecologist working during a high-tension doctors’ strike. He would later serve in Cabinet under a Labour government alongside Debono Grech, as social policy minister in the 1990s.
‘We have to keep this in mind,’ Debono Grech said on the television programme, ‘this was the only political murder that ever happened in Malta. The courts declared this. There never was a political murder in Malta. This was the only political murder in Malta.’
It is unclear whether Debono Grech was referring specifically to murders declared political by the courts – and it is also unclear whether this ambiguity was intentional or not.
In 2010, Malta’s civil courts declared that Grech’s killing was motivated by medical-political reasons, ordering the state to pay €419,000 in damages to the murdered girl’s family.
But Debono Grech’s statement glosses over several other murders throughout recent history that are also widely considered to be political.
In 1982, Lino Cauchi, an accountant, was murdered and thrown down a well. While the case is still shrouded in mystery, it is widely believed that his killing was connected to his knowledge of corrupt dealings involving then-prominent Labour minister Lorry Sant and his associates. Forty years after the killing, Cauchi’s family were awarded €615,000 in compensation, after courts found that the police had failed to open a magisterial inquiry and preserve crucial evidence in the aftermath of the murder.
Four years later, in 1986, Raymond Caruana was shot dead in a drive-by shooting while at a newly-opened Nationalist Party club. Caruana was not specifically targeted – he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – but it was a political killing nonetheless, because the political party club was targeted.
More recently, the 2017 assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was found by a public inquiry to be not only political – linked directly to her investigative work – but the result of state failure.
Despite this, Debono Grech’s claim was amplified by several social media accounts, including ‘Ix-Xewka’, which is further perpetuating the narrative by resharing the video and captioning it with ‘L-uniku qtil politiku fl-istorja ta’ pajjiżna’ (‘The only political murder in the history of our country’).
In allowing Debono Grech’s views to go unchallenged – the programme’s host did not question his statements – ONE, the Labour Party-owned station, also propagated this misinformation.
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Originally published here.
