straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. six years ago, a remarkable investigative journalist was assassinated on the mediterranean island of malta. her name was daphne caruana galizia. in life, she refused to be silenced about the scale of corruption in her homeland. in death, she has become the inspiration for a continued struggle forjustice and accountability. a struggle now led by her three sons, one of whom, paul caruana galizia, is my guest today. what are the lessons of this tragic death in malta?

paul caruana galizia, welcome to hardtalk. thank you so much for having me. it is a great pleasure to have you here and, indeed, also a pleasure to read your book. you've just published it — a death in malta: an assassination and a family's quest forjustice, you call it. you've worked on this book for a long time. it is six years since your mother was murdered. working on the book, do you feel you have come to understand her in a new way? a different way? yes. so the funny thing about the book was, i thought writing about her murder would be the very difficult thing, you know, for all the obvious and gruesome reasons.

but in the end, what proved the hardest was learning about her life before the murder. in fact, before my brothers and i were born, so what made her a journalist, the kind of country she grew up in. and that was all new to me. and it made, for personal reasons, the book its own reward. and it was only once i learned about her early years that i understood why she did the kind ofjournalism she did, and what drove her. had she been somewhat reticent about it in life? i mean, by the time she was murdered, you were in your late 20s. but ijust wonder how much you had talked to her about that really rather extraordinary decision she took as a very young woman, to get into writing and then into journalism. never, i'm embarrassed to say. and i... you know, i guess i have a typical son's curiosity in their mother, in that ijust

always took herjournalism for granted, that it was so much a part of her. it was a fact of her, and to think of her as not doing that work, even though it was very difficult, for her and for us, and was just unimaginable to us. she was someone who was born to do it. but do you think she got into it partly because of a sense of being stifled by malta? you know, she was very much of this small island and its population is only half a million. she was of it, and yet she somehow felt different, it seems... yes. ..from the people around her. that's right. she developed this fascination with reading quite early on, which, you know, most writers have in their childhood. but the reading, or the material she was reading, came in the form of foreign magazines and newspapers that her parents, my grandparents, subscribed to. and i think

that really mattered, because the malta she grew up in — so the �*60s and �*70s was — particularly in the �*70s, and actually early �*80s — was a very closed country. so a very closed economy and very corrupt and violent politics. and she always looked to these publications and saw that they were colourful and the writing was irreverent. and she would ask herself, "why? "why do they have that and we don't? "why can they write freely and we can't?" and for her, writing was the means through which she would create the country she wanted,

the country she thought we should all aspire to. i mean, she was a pioneer in the sense that there really weren't outspoken newspaper columnists who used their own name. and that was a key thing. she chose to go by her own name. she was identifiable in this small island, where pretty much everybody knew everybody. yes. she became the voice of those who were deeply dissatisfied with the way malta worked. that's right. so you mentioned that the population is small, half a million. when i was growing up, it was, of course, smaller. i remember the population being 300,000 people. and, you know, it's difficult to express just how stifling that can be and how difficult it makes it to write very honestly about people and events because, you know, you might be writing about someone�*s cousin, someone�*s son, someone�*s boss.

well, you most certainly are. yes, you are. and the thing is, she's not writing stuff that's easy. no. i mean, she's writing stuff that is actually... that's right. ..extremely damning. and she... so she took a very conscious decision, when she was in her early 20s, and shortly before i was born, that if she is going to do this, then she has to do it properly. and she can't hide behind a pen name, which is what other journalists did out of fear of violent reprisals. and she can't censor herself. she can't moderate opinions she holds that are true to her, and that she has to just go for it. and as she said, and i quote this in the book, it was a double shock — first that we had this voice, very lively, very honest and opinionated. second, that it was a woman. right? because she was the first woman to write a political column. and we're talking the early �*90s here. and, you know, the reaction was quite varied. some people really liked that there was a new voice, a challenging one. but then she said her editor would get comments like, "who is this person? "is her father writing her columns for her? "is her husband writing her columns for her?" so it really was a shock. she, overyears, described malta's people and culture as — i'm quoting words of hers here —

"ignorant, amoral, avaricious." she focused, zoomed in on, corruption. one of her first big exposes, i believe, was an expose of a senior military officer whose son was caught smuggling cocaine into malta. yes. and when she released this information into the public domain, that family went after her in a big way. yes. so there were a number of reprisals related to that case. but she again decided, no. if the point of the journalism is to expose these problems so that the country does change in a way she always wanted it to, then shejust has to do it and... but there's lots to unpick here, because, as she went on with her work, and she expanded it — not only did she work for the independent newspaper as a columnist, but she, over time, developed her own blog. i mean, she was very savvy about the rise of social media, so she could say things in the blog that were even more outspoken than she could in a newspaper column, and hundreds of thousands of hits per week would be registered on her blog, which, again, not to belabour the point, but in a tiny island, was quite something. her voice was really, really powerful. did she not ever, with you, and her other two sons and your father, her husband, did she not sit around the table and say, "i don't know whether we can continue

"to live like this because i am getting threats. "you are having to live very difficult lives "because of what i write. "how do you all feel about it?" so the funny thing is this — that when we were young, it was sort of explained away. she brought us home from school one day. and we found our border collie, who we called messalina, lying across our doorstep in a pool of her own blood. and again, my mother told us, "don't worry, messalina just ate snail poison." and it was only until much later, in fact, when i was a teenager, that she said, "no, someone slit her throat." but do you think she and yourfather ever thought about leaving, walking away from this atmosphere and these threats? it was certainly discussed between them at home. and there were certainly moments when i wanted my mother to leave. but her attitude was always that leaving is a kind of admission, not so much of failure, but that the subjects of her reporting won, that they beat her out of the country, or rather, that their vision of malta triumphed over hers, you know. despite the threats against her, against us, my brothers and i,

that this is...this is the right approach to the country. you have to be able to write these things. otherwise, you know, what are we left with? what kind of country are we left with? i want to get back to some of the most important exposes she wrote in a moment. butjust on her style, and this is difficult, because we're talking about your mother, and she was murdered. yes. and that's a tragedy there's no escape from. but do you think she was unwise at times in the way she wrote? she was so opinionated and she picked on people and she, you know, frankly, she was very rude about people. mr muscat, the prime minister, who we'll talk about more in a minute in terms of the content of her articles. but, you know, she repeatedly

called him "the poodle." she mocked other officials for wearing wigs or for being overweight. one key magistrate she described as looking like the back end of a bus. of course, no—one wants to be called the back end of a bus, or "the poodle" or have their hair made fun of. and, you know, it was very much... today we call it trolling, i suppose. well, she...it was a form of satire that i think was a product of a very conservative society, where women weren't expected to have opinions or write. and the kind of...the force of her writing was, you know, in opposition to those very strong conservative forces. and she wanted to make a statement. would i have written about people's wigs and their appearance? maybe not like she did. the thing, though, is this — that in the end, a lot of these people turned out to be a lot worse than, you know,

looking like this or that. no, understood, but it did make her a lot of enemies. yes. and it also allowed some people to call her a snob... yes. ..some people to say that she was anti—maltese. and there's a journalism professor who i know respects her very much for her work, butjoseph borg, he said there were times when daphne's journalism wasn't accurate, and that her very strong opinions sometimes swayed her away from reporting fairly. i think her reporting was always very straight, actually, on allegations of corruption, and were always very well evidenced and very well sourced, as we now know, right? post—murder, a lot of her stories have been found to be very, very true, very robust. in fact, more true than she knew. when it came to her satirical writing... you know, people...a

lot of people liked it. some people didn't. the importance of herjournalism is found, though, in the reporting. it's the reporting that motivated her murder. that changed the country. and it's the reporting that made her name. and that's what i want to focus on, as we get to 2017 and the...period around her death. she was working on some extremely complex, difficult, challenging stories, involving what appeared to her to be corruption at the highest levels of government, including one extraordinarily complex case of an energy company... yes. ..in malta, which appeared to have links to foreign money and to offshore bank accounts, seemed to involve senior officials. she was working on that at the time of her death. there were other stories she'd worked on that year, which again,

called into question the integrity of senior officials. you were in london in october 2017. when you heard from your family that her car had been blown up, that she'd been killed, and you were so far away, were you shocked? so it was my brother matthew who called me. and matthew was at home with her at the time and heard the bomb go off and ran out of the house, and tried to rescue her from her burning car. and i was in london, as you said, and i kept getting a call from a maltese number i didn't recognise, until... ..i finally picked up to hear matthew tell me, "paul, there was a bomb in her car. "come home now." and i remember that moment perfectly because it's one of these moments where your sense of time totally falls apart.

i felt like there was an eternity between every one of matthew's words, and i felt like i was outside myself looking at myself. it was a very difficult day, because it was 2pm london time. the next flight home was at half eight from heathrow. the flight is three hours. and it's hard... it's hard to explain how strange it is that your mind tries to make sense of something like that, while at the same time trying to process what happened. and i remember being driven home and my father warning me that the valley beneath our house isjust covered in police officers and soldiers and floodlights. and this is a place that was a real scene of our childhood, you know, where we sort of run down the hill, play in the fields.

and it was now our mother's murder scene. and i think we were shocked. but i think part of us, my brothers — my father and i — we all felt it might end up here somehow. and in retrospect, we should have done more than felt that because the escalation of abuse and harassment against her was extraordinary. certainly in the last five years of her life, and it kind of built and built in the form of libel suits, criminal libel suits. do you think she was living in fear in those last days, weeks and months? i think she was living in fear, i think... i think there were two reasons towards the end of her life

that she rarely left the house. one was that she was harassed outside the house, but the other was, i can now see, the other was a safety concern, that she felt safer in the house, and the garden is bordered by a wall. she felt safer not using her car. i can now see that she was living in a state of fear. and there was one, actually, moment that didn't make it into the book, when it was the last time i went to malta to see her, because no—one else was around. and this weird thing happened where we went to a restaurant and when we went back to the car, we got into a car that looked exactly like my mother's, but wasn't hers. someone had left their own car unlocked. and my mother thought someone broke in and stole things from the car, and was in a blind panic and crying and screaming until we realised what had happened. and i remember thinking afterwards, "this is what she's feeling all the time."

in that moment, she thought someone had tampered with the car, already then, the summer of 2017. we must fast forward now and think about the six intervening years which, of course, have allowed you to produce this book. and they've also produced some sense ofjudicial action to find and bring justice for your mother's murder. three individuals have been convicted in connection with that murder and are serving prison time. i think it's fair to say all of them are seen as people who are sort of low—level in terms of their role in the assassination plan. yes. there is another key figure, one of malta's richest businessmen, yorgen fenech, who is facing a trial, which we believe will be next year, of complicity. yes. conspiracy to murder. yes. now, that's going to be a very

explosive trial in malta. does that, to you, represent the moment when justice will really be tested? whether your family can say, "we are getting justice?" it won't be the final moment. it will be a key moment. it should, of course, be said... i should have said already that mr fenech absolutely denies all the charges he faces. yes, he does. he does deny them. so fenech... so in malta, there's no distinction in our criminal code, in the hierarchy of a conspiracy to commit murder. so all these men involved in my mother's murder, have been charged or are facing charges of conspiracy. having said that, fenech is the person that the prosecutors allege, and my family certainly supports the prosecution's case and has seen an abundance of evidence to support this,

that fenech commissioned the murder and paid for it. and it will be a key moment in our campaign forjustice, because it will test the robustness of our courts, of our prosecution and of our campaign over the past six years. what's striking, though, if we go beyond just the case involving those allegedly responsible for your mother's murder, what's striking is, that in your mother's wider work, all of the different exposes and the different scandals concerning the abuse of power and endemic corruption in malta, there have been very few successful prosecutions. and i'm just wondering, as we sit here today and you review where malta is, six years on from your mother's murder, do you believe malta is a place where governance is cleaner, where lessons have been learned, where your mother's railing against

a culture of corruption, has, in the long run, had a real effect? i think it has had a real effect. i don't think progress has been anywhere near fast enough and deep enough, that we need it to be. so one of the really good things i think that's developed in the country since her murder is the development of civil society, which was very weak, almost non—existent, before her murder. you and your brothers have tried to play a role in building that. yes, we have. and in fact, we set up a foundation in her name, which supports civil society and journalism in malta, and all the proceeds from this book go to that foundation. and that's been a really effective and sustainable force for good and change. so we've seen, as a result of that growth in civil society, more public interest litigation. in short, people have seen that the political process, and the parliamentary process, has failed them. so they've turned to civil society, and they've turned

to the courts, for some measure ofjustice. but even then, i'm just looking at a public inquiry report from 2021, which found that there was an atmosphere of impunity, which was directly connected... to the murder. ..the murder of your mother. which in fact enabled the murder, right? so the judges...my brothers and i campaigned for years for that public inquiry, which was malta's first public inquiry, and chaired by three very senior members of the judiciary, who wrote in theirfinal report that the country was on its way to becoming an entrenched mafia state and that there is this really horrible, for us, as a family, a very bitter truth, that it was my mother's murder that stopped malta from going further down that path. did you believe that? i believed...| believe that after. . . many years after the murder, that i began to see things were changing, right? we had the public inquiry,

which is already a big moment. but then, for example, the public inquiry made numerous recommendations for constitutional reform in the country so that no murder like this can ever happen again. not a single one of those recommendations has been implemented. sadly, we're almost out of time. i just want to end by linking what you've just said to the very personal story at the heart of this, because i was very struck by something you wrote recently. you said, "working on the aftermath of "your mother's "murder is a life sentence. "there is no going back to normal "because our mother is never coming back. "and we, as a family, have years of fighting ahead." do you still feel that today? i think i'll always feel that. i think we'll be in the courts for the rest of our lives in some form of criminal or civil proceedings. ithink, you know, there are these moments where you get small measures ofjustice, prosecutions,

hopefully convictions. but at the end of the day, nothing will return her to us. paul caruana galizia, thank you so much for joining me on hardtalk. thank you so much. good evening. high pressure has brought a welcome change to much drier weather for most this weekend, but there are still numerous flood warnings in force, around 170 during the day today. as ever, there is more detail on those on the weather website, including a warning for ice

for the night ahead. but the high pressure that has brought the drier weather this weekend is staying put, as you can see, through the working week. there will be quite a keen wind in the south accentuating the chill, but for most, little rain in the forecast. it looks much drier, therefore, but it is already colder and it will remain so. and we've had some stubborn fog this weekend. in fact, during sunday across parts of northern ireland, scotland, northern england and wales, and indeed that will thicken up as we go through the coming night, there could be the odd pocket further south as well. what we will find is more showers coming into east anglia and the south—east. widely frosty i think even where we see the towns and cities just above freezing, the ground will still turn potentially frosty and icy because we have had a lot of rain. but overnight we are going to see those showers, and into monday, popping up across the east anglia region and the south—east of england, and they will be snow even at lower levels, it is cold air.

with a few centimetres potentially over the downs, that will make things very slippery potentially because they could wash off the salt. ice is certainly an issue in the south and east but also elsewhere because it has been so damp. the fog again for central and southern scotland, northern ireland, northern parts of england and wales, it might well linger. but we will see some brightness and some sunshine as well. the wind is a little stronger again across southern parts compared to today, pushing wintry showers across other southern counties through the day. and making it feel colder still. we will see a smattering of snow in those showers further south, particularly over the hills and the channel islands. into tuesday, the high pressure system stays towards the north, those keen east winds or north—east winds continue in the south. but that might benefit, pushing the showers out of the way and breaking the cloud up a bit more for more sunshine. but still again plenty of it for north—west scotland, northern ireland, western england and wales, more in the south. might pick up a bit more cloud across north—eastern

coasts but as you can see temperatures below par. and as we go through the rest of the week, it stays largely dry but it is still pretty chilly.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm steve lai. the headlines. in bangladesh, prime minister sheikh hasina wins a fourth consecutive term in an election boycotted by the opposition. in gaza — at least 70 people

are reportedly killed in the jabalia refugee camp. anthony blinken, says israel must do more to prevent civilian casualties. rishi sunak confirms that the uk government is looking at legal options to exonerate postal staff wrongfully convicted of fraud. and hollywood rolls out the red carpet for one of its biggest nights — the golden globe awards. welcome to bbc news — broadcasting to viewers in the uk and around the world. we begin in bangladesh where prime minister sheikh hasina has led her party to another general election victory. the awami league has won

a hundred and fifty two of the parliamentary seats declared so far,