Consider This from NPR - Tracking Down A Journalist's Killers

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

When Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in 2017, she was in the midst of reporting on corruption within the island's government. After her death, a small team of reporters picked up her work where she left off, determined to find the people behind her assassination.In this episode, we'll talk with one of those reporters — Stephen Grey from Reuters — about their investigation, which has uncovered new evidence about the network of people responsible for killing Caruana Galizia.This episode also features reporting from NPR's Joanna Kakisiss. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. Daphne Caruana Galizia was running late. She was supposed to be at the bank at 3 p.m, but there was too much work to do. She was a renowned investigative journalist on the island of Malta, and she had calls to make. The country's economy minister was suing her for libel after she reported that he had visited a brothel on a work trip to Berlin. If someone tried to shut her up, if someone tried to stop her, she'd just fight back even harder. That was her spirit. It was the fall of 2017, and Galizia's son Matthew, also a journalist, was at home working alongside his mother. He remembers her putting the finishing touches on a new blog post, publishing it, and finally heading out the door. Then, the sound of

an explosion. I knew it was a car bomb straight away. I just kind of leapt out of my chair and ran out. I knew what it was immediately. Matthew ran out of the house toward the car. I tried calling my mother on her phone, obviously didn't ring. When I got there, there was just so much destruction and so much fire. The assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia rattled the small Mediterranean island. Thousands of people attended a candlelight vigil for Daphne Caruana Galizia on Monday. Today, this is undoubtedly a dark and sad, sad, sad, sad day for Malta.

One of her sons says he thinks his mother was assassinated because of her work. Her death also galvanized a small team of journalists to investigate her murder and pick up her reporting where she left off. We sat down and thought, well, what was it? What was the trail that she was on that she hadn't quite solved? Could that be the clue? Could that point to the killer? Stephen Gray is a reporter at Reuters who has covered Malta for years. After Galizia was killed, he and other reporters, including her son Matthew, saw police slow-walking the investigation.

So they did it themselves. Honestly, there was obviously luck involved because I've been a journalist nearly 30 years and this is the first time, you know, we actually succeed. It's your first time solving a murder, huh? Well, quite, yeah. Consider this. Every year, dozens of journalists are killed for their work.

Now, new evidence has come to light in one of the most notorious cases in recent memory. Evidence gathered by a crack team of dogged journalists who refuse to let the story go. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Monday C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Daphne Caruana Galizia was used to getting in trouble for her reporting. I was arrested, I was told, because of an article I published about the leader of the opposition. That's Galizia in 2013 outside a police station. The Maltese elections were the next day, so it was against the law for media outlets to publish anything political. Galizia posted an article anyway.

But it's absolutely appalling in a democratic country in 2013 that the law should seek to control what people say and what they write. It's appalling. Earlier in her career, Galizia had worked for the big newspapers in Malta. But in 2008, she started her own blog called Running Commentary.

Over the years, she built it into a one-woman investigative newsroom, uncovering rampant corruption and scandal in the Maltese government. By the time she was killed in 2017, Galizia's blog was seeing upwards of 400,000 readers a day. That's more than three quarters of Malta's population. She had recently broken stories exposing the offshore banking of some Maltese government officials. She was this fabulous journalist. That's Stephen Gray again, the reporter from Reuters. He is the host of a new podcast called Who Killed Daphne? It's a six-part investigation into Galizia's death. I asked him first to explain her stature in the Maltese press at the time she died.

What made her such a towering figure? She was operating on a very small island in the Mediterranean, but she'd put it on the map in Europe. But unfortunately for Malta, put it on the map as a place of very serious corruption, where, you know, ministers were setting up while an office was setting up companies in Panama, they were selling off the country's passports, they were setting up money laundering operations. One issue after another, she'd exposed and it turned out she did most of it on her own. I knew what she was doing, didn't know quite how alone she was. And that was the awful thing.

We didn't get to support her when she was alive. But this podcast is us trying to set that right. Yeah, soon after she was killed, the police arrested three men who were accused of carrying out the hit. But then you say that authorities seemed uninterested in tracking down who might have ordered the killing. So you started looking at who her enemies might have been, and she had lots of them. Why was the list so long? Why did so many powerful people have it in for her?

Well, it was partly her character. She wouldn't stop. And she unpicked the island. She was like a one-woman WikiLeaks, she's been called. And she was a woman in a very male-, when you realized how many powerful enemies Daphne had, what hope did you think you had of actually solving this mystery? Well, and I should say I'm not maligning everybody in the police. There were people there trying to do it, to solve this one, but it looked like they needed some help. So we didn't think that we would solve anything. You know, what we tried to do, you know, as journalists,

we continue the work of other journalists. And that's what we wanted to do here. And then it became clear that though the police were following a chain of evidence from the bomb scene, they were not interested in following the people she wrote about, in investigating the matters that she was looking at and actually taking up the puzzles that she was trying to solve. To solve those puzzles,

Gray connected with other local journalists and with Galicia's family. They followed leads from Galicia's reporting, pressured law enforcement, and rallied support from newsrooms overseas. They began to piece together a network of people allegedly involved in the plot, and they even got a jailhouse confession from one of the men arrested for the murder. I mean, I was just gobsmacked, you know, but we did identify,

as you'll hear, the person identified as the mastermind who is now accused, officially charged, and a trial is happening. It is a dramatic narrative. It has the pacing of a thriller. I mean, there is a scene before dawn at a harbor with a boat that's almost escaping that could really come right out of an action movie. It was then the captain noticed something. Through the side window of the bridge, a blue light flashing in the dark. Out of the gloom, a motorboat came into view, speeding across the waves. It was heading straight for him. Then he saw two more patrol boats closing in from each side. Six soldiers stormed aboard,

Marines from the Maltese Armed Forces. Logan opened his mouth to ask what was going on. Then he saw a red laser sight on his chest. Yeah, some of these scenes, they write themselves. It was a dramatic moment when we lived it as well. You know, at that end, at the end scene, I know you can feel the excitement that we went through because it's one of those moments when the whole country was in a state almost of revolution. People were out on the streets. You knew something was going to happen. It was one of those moments you went to bed about two in the morning, you woke up at six

and you didn't even feel tired because you were so excited about what the next day would bring. This actually made international news. I mean, people in the streets in Malta chanting mafia, mafia, accusing the government of corruption, thousands of people. It must have been totally surreal to know that you played some role in that. Absolutely. I've never lived through anything quite like that. And, you know, it is a compelling story, tinged, though, by the fact that with that sadness that it's real,

you know, it's not fiction. It really is real. And, you know, the struggle for justice does still continue in that case and obviously in the case of many others as well. Another plot point that I think is not a spoiler because it was widely reported, including on NPR, is that the Prime Minister Joseph Muscat ultimately had to resign, along with other top government ministers. And the way Muscat described it to you, he says

his worst defense was trusting the people around him who turned out to be corrupt. He portrays himself as innocent, if naive. Do you believe that? He he may say that and i couldn't possibly comment i mean you must have an opinion even if it's one you don't feel comfortable sharing well that's right but you know all i can say is there remain some loose ends among those who leak this information about this investigation how how high it went. If not the murder, perhaps the cover-up, that is still out there. So it's not a clean-cut ending, but it's still satisfying in many ways. It does bring justice, but there's still more to come.

You are now part of a consortium called Forbidden Stories, and the group's slogan is, Killing the Journalist Won't Kill the Story. Can you tell us about the organization's mission? Yeah, absolutely. It's a fabulous idea. Laurent Richard, a Paris journalist who is the founder of it, he spent about a year thinking about it. What can we do to help to keep alive the memories of all these journalists in general who are getting killed all the time? And so he set up this outfit, which has united so many journalists around the world, not just people who've been killed, but also those imprisoned who also can't continue their work. And systematically in Mexico, other places in South America, in Asia. Lots of projects have come together, which Forbidden Stories is coordinating.

And it's a really smashing idea, which I'm very proud to have been part of. I feel torn between a sense of satisfaction that a group like this exists and a sense of dread that there is enough work for a group like this to do. Absolutely. And you know, you can't dip into every case. You can't intervene everywhere. Hopefully, in most cases,

the police will do their job. But we show that if there's going to be a cover up that will intervene, you know, there's got to be a way that we create a disincentive. You're likely as not, things will get worse for you if you try and kill the messenger. That's Reuters reporter Stephen Gray, host of the new podcast, Who Killed Daphne? You can see all the team's reporting at ForbiddenStories.org. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.