Live blog: Yorgen Fenech compilation of evidence reopens in Daphne murder case

The compilation of evidence against Yorgen Fenech reopens on Tuesday, more than two years after it was first concluded by a criminal court.

Fenech’s legal team asked the process to reopen to present an additional set of witnesses who have not yet testified.

Fenech stands accused of complicity in the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in a car bomb assassination in 2017.

Three men are serving time in prison for having placed and detonated the bomb that killed her. Fenech is alleged to have commissioned and paid for the assassination.

The compilation stage – the first and most lengthy process within Malta’s criminal justice system – was initially wrapped up in late 2021 and the case appeared poised to be heading for a trial by jury.

But Fenech’s legal team successfully petitioned the courts to order the compilation stage to be reopened to hear a number of witnesses.

Among them are a Europol expert who extracted data from Caruana Galizia’s cloned phone, three police officers and other foreign experts.

Follow events with our live blog.

Live blog

Defence: prosecutors misled court

11.37am Mercieca goes for the jugular.

The court was given the impression by prosecutors that the experts had already testified and there was no need for them to be summoned as part of the compilation of evidence, he says.

Now, it emerges there is relevant information to be presented, possibly in favour of the defence. And to do that work the experts need a “substantial amount of time.

Had they testified back then, Mercieca argues, Yorgen Fenech would be out on bail because the maximum time limit an accused can be held in custody would have lapsed.

Mercieca also gives notice that the defence might be raising further pleas about this “at the opportune moment.”

Another delay on the horizon?

11.27am We’re back inside.

The court says Bajada should limit himself to presenting threats that Daphne received on her phone.

Fenech’s lawyers want Bajada’s remit to extend to her blog, Running Commentary, and ask the court to relay that request to the criminal court.

Lawyer Charles Mercieca notes this whole process is going to take months – at least until February or March of next year.

He also notes that the defence had asked for this to happen way back in July 2021. The court had then ordered the police to indicate the relevance of those witnesses.

Now, more than two years later, it’s clear that the evidence is relevant and important, the lawyer says.

Testimony continues in private

11.16am Bajada is asked more questions about these people with a possible ‘motive’, but says that divulging more would force him to reveal some confidential information related to pending investigations.

Hearing that, the magistrate orders his testimony to continue behind closed doors.

So out we go once again.

Identifying blog threats

11.09am Bajada clarifies his earlier comment about 482 people – they identified 482 suspects who posted what could be construed as threats on Daphne’s blog. People who possibly had a “motive”, he says.

Defence lawyer Charles Mercieca pounces on that. So these people possibly had an interest in killing Daphne Caruana Galizia, he says.

Bajada tempers that suggestion. The comments had to be taken into context, he says, and were whittled down to 8 to 10 stories which were possibly relevant to the crime.

Bajada has not seen Europol report

11.02am Bajada says he personally took the cloned phone to Europol offices in the Netherland, where two teams of experts worked on it. The mobile was eventually sent back.

Bajada says he has not seen the Europol report.

‘Let’s stick to phone’

10.59am Comments posted to Daphne’s blog are also relevant, the expert says, as they could contain threats against her.

But the deputy AG notes that the judge who appointed Bajada, Edwina Grima, had instructed him to focus on the cloned phone, not the blog. “So let’s stick to that,” he tells the witness.

The defence disagrees. Lawyer Charles Mercieca says Bajada was initially given a broader remit or combing through the phone and blog, by inquiring magistrate (now Judge) Neville Camilleri.

Cross-referencing blog posts

10.56am Bajada tells the court that Caruana Galizia wrote about 482 different people on her blog, Running Commentary.

Bajada was tasked with checking data on her phone against those blog posts, after the person initially handed that responsibility, Judge Emeritus Geoffrey Valenzia, resigned. That report has not yet been presented.

Bajada tells the court that Europol was given both the cloned mobile phone as well as copies of the Running Commentary blog posts.

The challenge of protecting Daphne’s sources

10.52am The court’s instruction to remove all references to sources proved problematic, Bajada tells the court.

How was he to interpret it? If a source just said “Hi Daphne”, that would be noted.

Court expert Martin Bajada testifies

10.49am Jeffrey Curmi is done testifying, and people can return to the courtroom.

Court expert Martin Bajada will testify now – and we expect him to do so in public.

Bajada cloned Daphne Caruana Galizia’s phone. The court had instructed him to remove any references to her sources before presenting the data in court.

What is Curmi testifying about?

10.40am Curmi is an explosives expert who was at the crime scene in Bidnija. The inquiring magistrate also appointed him to compare the explosives used in that bomb blast to those used in five other cases.

When, earlier this month, Fenech’s lawyers presented their arguments for Curmi to be summoned as a witness, prosecutors objected, arguing that Fenech was not a suspect in any of those other cases.

Jeffrey Curmi. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

But Fenech’s lawyers argued that was no grounds for discounting Curmi’s relevance as a witness, and that the court had to hear what he had to say first.

They also noted that AG lawyers were able to hear Curmi’s testimony when he testified in proceedings against Tal-Maksar brothers Robert and Adrian Agius, George Degiorgio and Jamie Vella, who are accused of supplying the bomb that killed Caruana Galizia.

Fenech, on the other hand, could not hear what Curmi had to say as he was not a party to those proceedings.

The court then accepted the request for Curmi to be summoned, provided he only be asked about the bomb that killed Caruana Galizia, and that he answer questions behind closed doors.

Curmi to testify in private

10.15am It all looked poised to begin, with Jeffrey Curmi – the former AFM commander and Malta’s future ambassador to the Netherlands – summoned to the witness stand.

But under order of the Criminal Court, Curmi is to testify behind closed doors. Journalists and others are asked to exit the courtroom. We’ll have to wait until his testimony is concluded before being allowed back in.

Magistrate in court

10.12am The various lawyers are filtering into the courtroom.

There’s Gianluca Caruana Curran and Charles Mercieca appearing for Fenech, with Deputy Attorney General Philip Galea Farrugia, AG lawyers Anthony Vella and Godwin Cini, and Police Inspector Kurt Zahra appearing as prosecutors.

Lawyer Jason Azzopardi is in court on the Caruana Galizia family’s behalf.

Fenech has just been brought into the courtroom.

The magistrate is out. The hearing can begin.

Who are the witnesses?

10.08am Fenech’s lawyers have presented the court with a list of various witnesses that they want to summon in the case. Some of those names can be made public, others cannot.

Key witnesses they have requested include a Europol forensics expert who was tasked with examining and extracting data from a clone of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s mobile phone.

The original phone was severely damaged in the bomb blast that killed her, but a separate Europol expert had managed to clone it and its contents.

Those experts had not presented their findings to the inquiring magistrate by the time the compilation of evidence had initially been concluded in August 2021.

Fenech’s lawyers have also asked Brigadier Jeffrey Curmi, the former commander of the Armed Forces, to testify. Curmi is an explosives expert and was appointed by the court to carry out a comparative study between the Caruana Galizia case and five other bomb cases.

We also know that Fenech’s legal team want to question local electronics court expert Martin Bajada, who worked on extracting data from Caruana Galizia’s phone, as well as a number of police officers.

And then there are some other, mystery witnesses who may be summoned.

How did we get here?

9.51am Yorgen Fenech was arrested in November 2019 and charged in early December.

Prosecutors then started presenting their evidence against him. That process, known as the compilation of evidence, ended on August 18, 2021. Or so we thought.

Fenech’s lawyers then filed a list of preliminary pleas against the bill of indictment issued against him.

Judge Edwina Grima heard submissions about those pleas in several court sittings, and handed down judgement on preliminary pleas on December 9, 2022.

The judge ruled that Fenech’s first statement to the police, which he provided in the hope of obtaining a presidential pardon, was to be struck from the record as evidence. She also accepted his request to reopen the compilation of evidence, but rejected all his other pleas.

Both the Attorney General and Fenech’s defence team filed appeals against the judge’s decisions, and a court of appeal ruled on their preliminary plea appeals on October 6, 2023.

As a result, the case was sent back to Judge Edwina Grima, who heard further pre-trial submissions by the defence. Perhaps the most eye-catching was an argument made by Fenech’s lawyers that “the true [murder] mastermind is a third party”.

Finally, on November 4, 2023 the judge sent the case back to Magistrate Rachel Montebello, which brings us to today.

Welcome

9.45am Good morning and welcome to this live blog.

Yorgen Fenech’s lawyers have filed a flurry of court cases over the past years, but they all centre around this one: the charges he faces concerning the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

The case is due to begin at 10am.

It’s been six years since Caruana Galizia was murdered and four since Fenech was arrested and charged, but the case has yet to go to trial. That’s because of a long and winding series of legal developments which we’ll be summarising for you shortly.