this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. 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. 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, 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 i partly because of a sense 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. so, she took a very conscious decision, when she was in her 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 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. 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 your father 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. 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, no, 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 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 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, force of her writing was in opposition to those very strong conservative forces. 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, to be a lot worse than 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. 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 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 ifelt 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 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 nonexistent, before her murder. you and your brothers have tried to play a role 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...i 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 there. we've got some very strong winds and heavy rain on the way from tuesday. we've got some very strong winds and some heavy rain on the way for tuesday, that brings with it the risk of some disruptive weather. little sign of that yesterday across northern england and scotland, with clear, blue, sunny skies for many. however, towards the southwest of england, the waves were picking up as the winds increased, all tied in with the next weather system. now, it's this lump of cloud that's out to our west that we're watching, to develop into quite a nasty looking area of low pressure. now, through the remainder of the night, one band of rain clears eastwards, another one heading into scotland, bit of snow up over the scottish hills for a time, as well. and then, we've got the next pulse of rain working into the southwest. now, bear in mind, we've already got lots of flood warnings in force, and that's before really the next

dollop of heavy rain works in. so the rain, heavy enough to cause some localised flooding, but as well as that, into tuesday, some very strong winds heading into southwest england, southern wales, and around the bristol channel. top gusts could reach 60—70mph — strong enough to bring down 1—2 trees, hence the risk of disruptive weather. very windy for the northern isles, and the winds will be increasing inland across england and wales as this area of rain becomes much more extensive through the course of the day. and then, we get a second swathe of really strong winds across parts of lincolnshire, east anglia, southeast england, especially through the dover straits. could get gusts again getting up into the 60s of miles an hour, maybe even towards 70. so there is the threat of some disruption — weather from the heavy rain and the risk of flooding, or the strong winds that could be strong enough to bring down a few trees. either way, that lot will be clearing out of the way as we head into wednesday, but just to be followed by another unsettled day — a day of sunshine and showers. the showers heavy with hail and thunder across england and wales, blustery conditions here. lighter winds for northern ireland means the showers could last a bit longer. some heavier, more persistent rain for northeast scotland perhaps causing 1—2 issues,

and cold enough to see some of the rain start to turn to sleet or snow over the hills in shetland. quite a lot going on, then, but the weather will eventually calm down. low pressure later this week will start to slide away from our shores — and instead, we get an area of high pressure building in as we head towards the end of the week and the weekend beyond. indeed, quite a long spell of dry, settled weather conditions is on the card — notjust through the weekend, but well into next week. with the sunshine comes much lower temperatures and a return of some sharp overnight frosts.

welcome to newsday. reporting live from singapore, i'm steve lai. the headlines... a powerful earthquake strikes japan, destroying buildings and killing at least four people. thousands have fled their homes, spending the night in shelters. israel's supreme court strikes down a controversialjudicial reform that triggered nationwide protests last year. migrant boat crossings in the english channel drop by more than a third — but the figures are still some of the highest on record. and stunning images captured by the james webb space telescope have been released, two years after it was launched by nasa. live from our studio in singapore.

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