VALETTA: Three men will face trial in Malta for their alleged involvement in the murder of anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia after the island’s attorney general issued a bill of indictment against them, court officials said on Tuesday.
The indictment comes days before a deadline that requires suspects who have not been formally committed for trial within 20 months of arrest to be granted bail.
Vincent Muscat and brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio are accused of having planted and set off a bomb that exploded in Caruana Galizia’s car near the Maltese capital Valletta on Oct. 16, 2017. All three suspects have pleaded not guilty during pre-trial proceedings known as the compilation of evidence, held before a magistrate.
It is not known when the trial will start.
The murder of Caruana Galizia, who penned an anti-corruption blog, appalled Europe and raised questions about the rule of law on the Mediterranean island.
Muscat and the Degiorgios were arrested and charged in December 2017 and have been in detention ever since. The courts have turned down repeated requests for bail citing the continuing police investigation and public order.
Maltese police have said their investigations are continuing as the three are not thought to have been the masterminds behind the killing, the motive for which is unknown.
The three suspects have not said a word to police, according to usually well-informed Maltese media.
Evidence presented in court by prosecutors over the last two years has suggested that Caruana Galizia, 53, was blown up by a bomb activated by a mobile phone.
Muscat was allegedly the spotter who watched the journalist drive out of her house in Bidnija, seven miles from Valletta, while one of the Degiorgio brothers is alleged to have set off the bomb by phone while on a yacht in Valletta harbor.
Officers from the US Federal Bureau of Investigations and Europol have helped Malta police investigate the case.
Caruana Galizia’s family has repeatedly called on Malta’s government to hold an independent public inquiry into the murder and into whether the government could have acted to prevent it.
The Council of Europe backed their call in a report last June and said an inquiry should be held within three months.
The government has said that a public inquiry could hinder the continuing police investigations, although the foreign minister has indicated that an inquiry might be held.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, a frequent target of Caruana Galizia’s writings, has offered a million euro ($1.2 million) reward for information leading to the arrest of the culprits.
Malta sends three suspects for trial on charges of killing anti-corruption journalist
Malta sends three suspects for trial on charges of killing anti-corruption journalist
- The Council of Europe backed their call in a report last June and said an inquiry should be held within three months
Amazon’s AWS reports outage after UAE datacenter struck by ‘objects’
- AWS confirmed sparks and fire after objects hit UAE data center causing disruptions to Emirate and Bahrain regions
- Full recovery expected to “be many hours away”
LONDON: Amazon’s cloud-computing facilities in the Middle East faced power and connectivity issues on Monday after unidentified “objects” struck its data center in the United Arab Emirates.
The objects had triggered a fire on Sunday that forced authorities to eventually cut power to two clusters of Amazon data centers in the UAE, with restoration expected to take several more hours, according to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) status page.
Localized power issues impacted AWS services in both the UAE and neighboring Bahrain, according to the page. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, although it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident.
While Amazon did not identify the objects, the incident happened on the same day Iran fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf States in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A strike, if confirmed, on the AWS facility in the UAE will mark the first time a major US tech company’s data center has been knocked offline by military action. It could also raise questions around Big Tech’s pace of expansion in the region.
US tech giants have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for artificial intelligence computing needed to power services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft said in November it plans to bring its total investment in the UAE to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips for its data centers there.
“In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints,” Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week.
Microsoft as well as Google and Oracle — both of which also operate facilities in the UAE — did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
AWS said a full recovery from the issues was expected to “be many hours away” for both UAE and Bahrain.
The outage had disrupted a dozen core cloud services and the company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions.
