IThere is a potentially momentous twist in the case of murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. In an interview in his cell at a Valletta prison with Reuters, George Degiorgio, who was accused of the deadly October 16, 2017 bombing, confessed to the crime. “For me it was just a business. Yeah, business as usual,” Reuters quoted the assassin as saying. In the conversation published on Tuesday evening, the 60-year-old Degiorgio adds: “Of course I’m sorry.”
A contract killing below price
However, the killer also conceded that he knew too little about the person he and two accomplices had been commissioned to kill, and that is why they had committed the contract killing underpriced: “If I had known more, I would have had ten million euros demands instead of 150,000.” According to the investigations so far, the three contract killers each received 150,000 euros for the murder of the 53-year-old journalist and mother of three. Caruana Galizia was the most prominent journalist in Malta, who tirelessly exposed and denounced nepotism and corruption in the island republic’s politics and economy in her blog “Running Commentary”, set up in 2008.
George Degiorgio was arrested in December 2017 along with his younger brother Alfred and accomplice Vince Muscat. Vince Muscat was sentenced to a reduced sentence of 15 years in prison in February 2021 after confessing to the crime and agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors.
So far, the brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio had denied their involvement in the contract killing. With the confession to Reuters, the brothers and their lawyers have now changed tactics with a view to the upcoming criminal trial against them. Initially, the brothers and their lawyers wrote to President George Vella, asking for a pardon from the head of state in return for naming those behind the bloody crime – allegedly a former minister and a former head of the prime minister’s cabinet. However, the pleas for clemency were rejected. Now the killers, who have now confessed, are following the example of their co-conspirator Vince Muscat and are hoping for a reduced sentence in return for appearing as key witnesses in the murder trial.
Degiorgio wants to name the client
George Degiorgio says in the Reuters interview that he decided to take the step to achieve a reduced prison sentence for himself and his brother. In addition, he did not want to “go down alone” if a prison sentence cannot be avoided. In the interview, Degiorgio announced that he would also name the person who commissioned a murder plot hatched against Caruana Galizia in 2015. It is “a leading political figure in Malta”. However, the first plot to eliminate the investigative journalist did not materialize.
In the interview, Degiorgio was also willing to make statements about the background to a bloodless hostage-taking that ended in a bank branch in Valletta in June 2010. The confessed assassin insinuated that high-ranking government employees were also behind this attack. Matthew Caruana Galizia, the eldest of the murdered journalist’s three sons, said in a first reaction to the interview: “George Degiorgio’s own words show that he is a cold-blooded killer who deserves no pardon.”
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