Panama Papers journalist’s son says she was killed for exposing corruption

VALLETTA: The son of Malta’s best-known investigative journalist said on Tuesday his mother was killed by a car bomb because of her work exposing political corruption, as hundreds of people held a demonstration to demand justice

Daphne Caruana Galizia, who wrote about graft across Malta’s political divides on her blog, died when explosives ripped through her car minutes after she left her home in the north of the island on Monday afternoon.

Maltese authorities were waiting for the arrival of Dutch forensic experts and American FBI agents to help the investigations. "My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists," Matthew Caruana Galizia said on Facebook.

"She was also targeted because she was the only person doing so," he added. He described rushing to the scene, only to find the burning car and her remains. On Tuesday afternoon, several hundred people demonstrated in front of the law courts demanding justice for her killing.

"The state did not defend Daphne," shouted Andrew Borg Cardona, addressing the crowd. He said those who accused her of "going over the top" with her investigations "are all guilty". One woman carried a votive lamp with the murdered journalist’s picture in it and another carried a sign that read "Looks like we can’t have freedom of speech but we want justice".

Recently, Galizia had been following up leads from information in the so-called Panama Papers, a large collection of documents from an offshore law firm in the Central American nation that were leaked in 2015.She was tracing alleged links between Maltese officials and offshore banks and companies used as tax havens. Half an hour before the explosion, Galizia wrote on her blog: "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.

Spokesman Margaritis Schinas was asked if the Commission would open an procedure to check if Malta was meeting the EU’s standards for the rule of law, a process now being applied to Poland over judicial reforms there.