For several years after the outbreak of civil war in Libya, Malta-based operators participated in and coordinated fuel smuggling between Libyan militias and warlords, and Italian organised crime. The smuggling operations used Maltese waters, harbour and infrastructural facilities to conduct their operations.
In March 2016, the United Nations Panel on Libya, reporting to the Security Council, claimed that fuel smuggled from Libya was being transferred between ships on the high
seas and brought to Malta. It stated that the mastermind was a Libyan national, who co-owned a company with a Maltese and an Egyptian national. In a detailed annexe on fuel smuggling, the UN report linked this company to fuel smuggling and pointed out that the Maltese authorities were aware of the company’s activities.9
Despite this, and despite years of reporting, including by Daphne Caruana Galizia, identifying suspects by name, no arrests occurred and the illicit activities were allowed to persist uninterrupted.
There are indications that the same elements who allowed these illicit activities to go on may have used them to derail the investigations into Daphne’s murder and draw the public attention away from the real culprits.