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. i mean, she's writing stuff that is actually... that's right. ..extremely damning. 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 she just 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, the difficulties my father experienced, we all kind of developed the same view, actually. and it was a sense that, you know, no, that 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. it's the reporting 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. hello.

let's take a look at the weather for the week ahead as we go into the start of 202a. now, new year's eve, saw plenty of blustery showers across the uk, particularly towards the west, where we saw some heavy downpours. beautiful clouds but some hail, some thunder and some very pretty rainbows with some sunny spells, too. some blustery winds towards the south—west in particular, along the south coast of england and through the south coast of wales from this deep area of low pressure gradually pushing eastwards with blustery showers swirling around it. on monday, we've got a quieter day of weather for new year's day. many of us will stay dry but there are also going to be some heavy downpours of rain again in the south, so into the new year, it will stay pretty unsettled, it will be wet and windy at times, especially towards the south. and then, into next weekend,

it is going to turn drier, more settled but also start to feel colder once more. so, as we head through the day on monday, it is a dry early start. there will be a lot of sunshine around as well. some showers out towards western areas of scotland. clouding over across wales and south west england through the late morning with the rain arriving by the end of the day but the sunshine lasting longest probably for northern england, east anglia, northern ireland and for much of scotland, where there will be plenty of dry weather around. temperatures slipping a little. mildest underneath that cloud and the rain towards the south—west. still rather blustery conditions towards the south coast. and as we head through monday evening, then that rain pushes further northwards and eastwards across already pretty saturated ground. do keep an eye on the bbc weather website, of course, for all the flood warnings in place. more rainjust waiting in the wings as we head through tuesday morning, again, mostly across the south of england and wales. so, if we just take a look

in a bit more detail, there's our rain just feeding into south—eastern areas of scotland with a brisk south—easterly wind. a bit wintry over the hills of aberdeenshire. more rain pushing across england and wales, gradually clearing further northwards as we head into the afternoon, so it will be drying out here. but, again, some blustery gusts of wind, probably largely dry across much of northern england throughout the day and for many parts of western scotland, too. temperatures mild in the south. again, cooler across northern ireland and scotland. and as we head through wednesday, that weather turns a little more showery towards parts of england and wales. a lot of dry weather across eastern areas of northern ireland and for northern england, too, again. more rainjust feeding through on that brisk south—easterly wind across parts of aberdeenshire. again, possibly a bit wintry over the hills. temperature 7—11 degrees celsius north to south. on thursday, it'll be another day of showers but also some brighter spells — a bit of sunshine around for many. here's the outlook for our capital cities as we head through thursday and friday. a bit more rain in the forecast for many on friday and the temperatures will start to slip. and things are certainly set to change as we head through into next weekend with high pressure starting to slip southwards from iceland. it becomes quite firmly established. we'll be on the cooler side of the jet, too, by then.

colder—feeling air dropping temperature with a north—easterly wind, so the focus of the showers as we head through the weekend and probably beyond that, too, will tend to be out towards the east and, again, some of those could turn out to be a little wintry in nature. so, all change. any showers will tend to be towards the east. drier, colderweather by the time we get to next weekend. northerly winds with some overnight frosts but possibly still a little blustery towards the south coast. bye—bye for now.

hello. i'm vishala sri pathma. let's take you now straight to new york and the famous dropping of the ball

on times square. these are live pictures from times square where tens of thousands of revellers are starting the party as 2024 starts there. people have been queuing since 5:00 in the morning to bag the best spots. the celebrity—filled event includes live performances from flo rida, megan thee stallion and ll cool]. cheering auld lang syne plays

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