Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist who relentlessly investigated corruption in her home country of Malta, was killed Monday afternoon in a car bomb outside her home. One of Malta’s leading politicians has called it “political murder” motivated by her reporting. “What happened today is not an ordinary killing,” said Adrian Delia, a leader of Malta’s political opposition.
Galizia was perhaps most famous for her reporting linking Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, his wife, and several associates to the Panama Papers, a trove of documents detailing several heads of states’ connections to secret offshore shell companies in Panama. Galizia alleged that Muscat’s wife, Michelle, owned one of these companies, and that the company had received a series of payments from an account linked to the government of Azerbaijan.
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Muscat and his associates denied any wrongdoing, but that didn’t dampen Galizia’s international prominence: Her blog, Running Commentary, was regularly read by 400,000 people—even though just 420,000 people live on Malta. Earlier this year, Politico dubbed Galizia a “one-woman WikiLeaks, crusading against untransparency and corruption in Malta, an island nation famous for both.”
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