Panama Papers journalist killed in Malta car bomb

Valletta, October 17

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A Maltese investigative journalist who exposed the island nation’s links to offshore tax havens through the leaked Panama Papers was killed when a bomb exploded in her car, the prime minister said.

Daphne Caruana Galizia, 53, had just driven away from her home in Mosta, a large town on Malta’s main island, when the bomb went off, sending the vehicle’s wreckage spiraling over a wall and into a field, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said.

The son of Malta’s best-known investigative journalist said on Tuesday his mother was killed because of her work exposing political corruption, as hundreds of people held a demonstration to demand justice.

Maltese authorities were waiting for the arrival of Dutch forensic experts and American FBI agents to help the investigations. “My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists,” Matthew Caruana Galizia said on Facebook.  

On Tuesday afternoon, several hundred people demonstrated in front of the law courts demanding justice for her killing.

Recently, Galizia had been following up leads from information in the so-called Panama Papers, a large collection of documents from an offshore law firm in the Central American nation that were leaked in 2015. — Reuters